Entries categorized under “D2D2T”

DCIG is very excited to announce the availability of its inaugural DCIG 2012 Big Data Tape Library Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 140 features on more than 60 tape libraries from 8 different storage providers. Driven by the explosion of storage requirements to address "Big Data" and the "Cloud," organizations are now more than ever looking for cost-effective, viable storage media on which to store this data. This is why DCIG believes tape libraries are poised to be one of the big benefactors of these growing storage demands which prompted DCIG to produce its first ever Tape Library Buyer's Guide to help enterprises choose the right solution for their environment. (read more)

When companies discuss their backup strategy, disk and tape are almost always part of that conversation. But in a recent interview that I did with Matt Jorgensen, the system administrator at Neumont University, we did more than talk about how the value of the Overland Storage's SnapServer N2000 and NEO 2000e in its backup strategy. We also discussed the critical role that the SnapServer N2000 plays in supporting the two different backup products in Neumont's environment. (read more)

Moving from "D2D2T" to "D2D2D" is sometimes seen as an unattainable hurdle that enterprise organizations cannot overcome when tape is used for secondary roles such as archiving or disaster recovery (DR). But replacing the "T" in "D2D2T" with a "D" is now practical, possible and affordable. Doing so simply means enterprises need to demonstrate that disk offers the same or more functionality than tape when used in these capacities while costing the same or less. (read more)

Of all the topics that I thought I might be writing about after my first day in attendance at the fall Storage Networking World (SNW) conference in 2010, I did not think tape would be it. In fact, it was not even on my radar screen walking into the show. But after meeting with the Ultrium LTO team yesterday at SNW, it is clear that tape is back in the storage conversation and those arguing for its broader adoption and continued use have much more to talk about than its power savings, larger capacities and faster speeds. (read more)

Over the past few years there has been a lot of hype that tape storage is being left dead. But while disk is capturing the fancy of enterprise organizations because of disk's success in solving their primary backup and recovery problems, longer-term issues with data management are just now starting to surface. It is for this reason that enterprise data centers are finding new tape library solutions such as the Overland Storage NEO 8000e well suited for their emerging archiving needs. (read more)

An article that appeared back in 2009 on the Forbes website commented on the questions that executive management teams are asking about proposals that they are receiving from their IT departments. Their uncertainty is probably only heightened when their IT departments bring forward a proposal that recommends a seemingly new process that involves the deployment of lesser understood technologies like deduplication and replication. (read more)

Small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) face some tough choices right now. Disk-based backup is definitely on the rise and has many appealing features, but it can come with a price tag that these organizations simply cannot afford and may not meet all levels of data protection needs. Many SMEs are using tape as a primary backup target or leveraging tape as an archive in a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenario. It is these requirements that the new NEO® 200s and NEO® 400s entry-level tape libraries announced this week from Overland Storage are designed to address. (read more)

One might think the data protection world has gone mad. After all of the coverage over the last few years about the "goodness" of disk and the "evils" of tape, a recent announcement from Spectra Logic that it had entered into a new OEM agreement with Symantec ran counter to this disk-based backup craze. What specifically caught my eye in this announcement was that Spectra Logic was now bundling solutions that would integrate Symantec's NetBackup and Backup Exec software solutions with either its disk or its tape library products. (read more)

Back in March I received a call from a records management provider in the upstate New York area who was inquiring, "How do I get started in providing disk-based backup for my current clients?" This records management provider currently only stores paper and tape in his company's facilities but rightly recognizes that there is a growing trend towards disk-based backup and did not want to be left out in the cold. But he was wondering what options were available in the market that he could offer his prospective clients. (read more)

Today's release of CommVault Simpana 8 continues to reflect CommVault's commitment to deliver enterprise data protection and management using a single product with multiple application modules. Yet it is Simpana 8's new global block-based data deduplication feature and new ability to deduplicate data stored to tape that is likely to raise excitement. Making these features integral to Simpana 8, CommVault does more than just give enterprises another deduplication option or simply lower tape costs. Instead it starts to put CommVault on a collision course with deduplicating storage appliances and even traditional tape devices while giving organizations new reason to ponder their longer term deduplication strategy. (read more)

Over the last few years, the performance demands of applications have outstripped the ability of backend disk storage systems to keep up with them. This has resulted in storage becoming a major bottleneck in the performance of Internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.), transaction oriented applications (airline reservation systems, credit card processors, stock trading systems) and even slowing the performance of corporate email applications such as Microsoft Exchange. This need for speed has resulted in the emergence of new tier of storage referred to within the enterprise space as "Tier 0" storage. (read more)

Disposing aging, depreciated or unneeded tape cartridges is an age old problem that companies resolve in one of three ways: they destroy them; they store them; or, they trade them in for hard cash or credits from resellers. This last option generates more than passing interest from companies since it offers them the opportunity to generate some revenue (or at least offset the cost of new tape cartridges). However the liabilities associated with the data on these recycled tape cartridges landing up in the wrong hands may outweigh whatever cost savings companies hope to achieve. (read more)

An area that is often overlooked in an IT infrastructure, at least until it's needed, is the backup and recovery environment. Then when the realization hits the company that it needs backup software, it's typically complex to install, configure and maintain, even in small environments, because of the fact that backup consists of so many moving parts (backup servers, tape robots, disk-based arrays, SAN networks, etc.). The good news is that more hardware and software vendors are stepping up to the plate and partnering to take some of the complexity out of installing and configuring backup software in these size environments. The most recent announcement between Dell and Symantec is the latest in the growing number of symbiotic relationships between hardware and software vendors in the backup space. (read more)

To say that over the last few years Overland Storage has experienced a tsunami of events that have dramatically impacted the company would be an understatement. Looking at Overland's most recent SEC 10-K filing gives some hint as to the challenges of the last few years: HP notified Overland it planned to stop shipping its tape products; Dell agreed to resell Overland's tape libraries and then cancelled its agreement; Overland then reversed its decision to outsource the manufacturing of its products and bring manufacturing back in house. These developments, along with the rapid shift in the general business market from tape to disk as a backup target, led Overland to aggressively pursue the disk-based data protection market while leveraging its legacy tape technologies to deliver end-to-end data protection. (read more)

Overland Storage's recent acquisition of the Snap Server line of NAS storage products from Adaptec breathes new life into a product line that had all but faded from view. Adaptec's lack of focus on the Snap Server line coupled with its changing message about what it intended to do with it made Snap Server a logical acquisition target for Overland Storage, which was actively looking to add NAS to its portfolio of disk-based backup products. But now that Overland Storage has it, the big job of explaining how Snap Server fits into customer backup environments falls to Steve Rogers, Overland Storage's Director of Product & Solutions Marketing. (read more)

While SaaS (Software as a Service) gets most of the press, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is finding its way into increasing numbers of corporate data centers. Parallel SCSI is a proven and reliable data transfer standard and serves the data center well, but all good things must eventually come to an end. With U320 parallel SCSI being the last stop on the SCSI roadmap, and with the advantages SAS has to offer over parallel SCSI, SAS is almost a certainty for the industry at large and your company specifically. (read more)

While the tape market is not growing as fast as it was in previous years, IDC announced that in calendar year 2007 LTO drive shipments increased by 15 percent over the previous year and the midrange tape automation market generated $1.3 billion in revenue. This robust market continues to spur innovation from companies such as Overland Storage, whose customer base still heavily relies upon NEO SERIES tape libraries and the ARCvault family of autoloaders and libraries as part of their data protection strategies. According to Peri Grover, Overland Storage's Director of Product Management, innovation remains important to the company's customers because their data storage requirements continue to grow. "It may seem obvious, but companies still need technologies - including tape technologies - that can keep up with this growth," she says. (read more)

Overland Storage's ULTAMUS RAID near-line data protection products and REO SERIES disk-based backup solutions provide a solid starting point for addressing customers' data protection requirements. However, Pendekanti astutely points out that the market is ravenous for innovation and it's obvious from recent management changes that Overland Storage feels the need to pick up the pace to become more competitive in the rapidly changing data protection market. (read more)

Have you ever looked at a technology solution that left you wondering why a specific technology matters? I often look at a technology solution and take note of its many features but then may walk away thinking it was a slick presentation but wonder why I should care about it? So when I evaluate a technology solution, I first look to see if it solves a real problem. This can include making me more productive, addressing a key operational pain point or in some way reducing operational costs. (read more)

Configuring, allocating and then managing storage capacity on storage systems has been to date been a very tenuous proposition. To address this, thin provisioning has recently emerged as a way for storage systems to only reserve the storage capacity that is actually needed. By monitoring when data is written to a storage system, it eliminates the need to allocate extra, unneeded storage capacity for an application. In so doing, thin provisioning provides a more efficient and cost effective approach to storage capacity management. However to date thin provisioning has been the exclusive domain of a few NAS and SAN based storage systems. (read more)

Any time one looks at midrange backup appliances, the appliances are almost always NAS based. When configured this way, the backup appliance is attached to the local LAN it appears as a filer server to the backup server and files are backed up to a folder on that appliance. Though I initially called to speak to Overland Storage's Senior Product Manager, Jeff Graham, about REO's Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) technology, I first wanted to get some clarification on why Overland Storage's REO-series appliances are configured as Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) rather than as a NAS-based appliance. (read more)

In case no one has noticed lately, the number of ways in which companies can configure disk-based storage systems to protect their data has multiplied significantly. This fact was brought clearly into focus by a pre-recorded video lecture that I recently watched on Overland Storage's Tiered Data Protection (TDP) website. (read more)