Overland Shows Its Primary Colors

Overland Storage unveiled its first primary storage offerings this week, as the company continues to remake itself in the wake of sliding tape sales and the loss of its OEM relationship with HP.

Overland appears determined to go it alone, fending off overtures from ADIC and announcing ambitious plans to compete with Network Appliance in primary storage.

Overland, which has long made a name for itself in tape backup, entered the disk backup market two years ago, and now also offers primary storage with the launch of its new Ultamus line.

The move gives Overland something no start-up can offer, says Overland senior product manager Jeff Graham — end-to-end data protection and a three-tiered storage approach for information lifecycle management (ILM) from a single vendor.

The Ultamus Protection OS, based on technology acquired from Zetta Systems in August, offers built-in data protection and simplified capacity management, with advanced features such as high availability, snapshots, remote and local replication, virtualization, and thin provisioning.

Ultamus can be easily deployed in iSCSI or Fibre Channel environments and combines one or two storage processors or servers with as many as four 8TB expansion arrays, for up to 32 TB of raw storage capacity. The expansion array offers RAID 5 and redundant, hot swappable components for added data protection.

Ultamus I is configured with a single storage processor and is targeted at businesses seeking reliable storage with built-in data protection, Overland says. For organizations that need uninterrupted access to critical data, the Ultamus II offers two storage processors with active/active failover, ensuring no single point of failure.

Ultamus pricing starts at around $50,000. On a price per terabyte basis, the company claims to be one of the best values around.

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