Tape library vendor Overland Storage Inc. will expand its presence in the nascent storage resource management field later this month.
The company will ship Overland Storage Resource Manager 3.1, as a “major rewrite” from the 2.1 edition of last summer, said John Cloyd, vice president and general manager of Overlands Storage Management business unit. A 3.0 release in December was for limited use, he said.
The new version is “switched from a client-based interface to a total Web-based interface. Weve already been testing it at single storage points of 5TB and 20 million files,” he said. It supports storage connected to Microsoft Corp.s Windows, Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris, Hewlett Packard Co.s HP-UX, AIX, and Linux, and will support Novell Inc. environments by the end of February, he said.
“Block size, partitions, LUNs (logical unit numbers), none of that matters to us. What we care about is, how many files have you got. Were doing a rifle-shot solution,” he added.
This spring, Overland, based in San Diego, will add management for storage-area networks, planning, and backup reliability/reporting. Those will be phased rollouts, he said, declining to specify their order. “Were on the side of, dont boil the ocean. We believe, attack the part of the problem that you can do right now.”
Besides numerous startups, Overland is competing against large vendors such as EMC Corp. and Veritas Software Corp.
Peter Lang, systems engineer with Government Employees Hospital Association Inc., in Lees Summit, Mo., bought the software after using a 60-tape Overland library for five years. Its connected into two data centers 30 miles apart, with a new IBM Shark storage-area network, currently at 1 TB and expected “to expand three or four times that,” he said.
“They actually came in and set up a demo box for me and started generating some reports. We looked at the Veritas product. We did a head-to-head comparison on what features we need and what they were charging for it,” Lang said. Veritas software bundle was approximately $70,000 and Overlands was just $3,000, he said. “The reports and the management it gives us allows us to do a lot of things,” he said.