Overland Revamps Its NEO Tape Libraries

Eighteen months ago, disk and tape storage maker Overland Storage was facing several serious business challenges.
It had just bought the popular Snap Server franchise for $3.6 million from Adaptec at the beginning of what was to become a worldwide recession. Tape wasn’t selling all that well, a top-level management change was in the works and the 20-year-old company was facing a tough struggle in the market because it did not have a deduplication feature to offer customers.
Much has changed. Now with a vibrant new CEO, Eric Kelly, a virtually all-new group of C-level execs and a fresh outlook, the storage company is finding that things are beginning to look up.
In addition, tape is being reconsidered by many IT managers, thanks to its reliability, low TCO and numerous green IT virtues.
Overland on Feb. 24 introduced a line of NEO E Series enterprise backup and tape archive packages incorporating the company’s homegrown and updated LTO-5 software, which consolidates disk and tape storage and essentially doubles the capacity of previous Overland deployments through deduplication and compression.
The NEO 2000E, 4000E and 8000 arrays provide nearly twice the performance and a 20 percent increase in I/O speeds compared with their LTO-4-based predecessors, Kelly told eWEEK.
The new NEOs are capable of managing tape storage capacities ranging in size from 45TB to 3PB and data movement rates as high as 24TB per hour, Kelly said.
Recovery and data consolidation combined
“Customers of all sizes can benefit from the high capacity, reliability and cost-effectiveness of tape solutions for disaster recovery and long-term archiving,” said IDC analyst Robert Amatruda. “Overland’s introduction of LTO-5 drives in its NEO tape libraries provides customers with innovation in tape for efficient archiving, recovery and storage consolidation.”
Overland also launched what it calls the NEO Upgrade and Save Program, in which current NEO customers receive cash rebates by upgrading their legacy NEO tape drive technologies to faster, higher capacity LTO-5 drives, Kelly said.
The new LTO-5 tape libraries are available now. Go here for more information.