It’s been a long, strange trip for Overland Storage. Best known in recent years for the tape backup libraries it sold through Hewlett-Packard, Overland is in the midst of an iSCSI-focused renovation at the hands of former Snap Appliance and Data Robotics execs. Could this reboot breathe new life into Overland as well as the SMB storage market it is focused on?

Just five days after HP announced it would acquire IBRIX, another scale-out NAS provider has been purchased. LSI announced today that it would acquire ONStor for $25 million in cash. The company sold a range of SAN and NAS storage systems, but was best-known for its Bobcat clustered NAS gateways.

Although I give the various players a hard time; the industry doesn’t do everything badly and I try to see the positives as well as the negatives. So I was thinking about the perfect array and what features I would like to see!

The mainstream media is still digesting the Oscar awards, but we in storage had our own announcement this week: TechTarget’s (now non-PDF?) Storage magazine announced their Storage Products of the Year award for 2008. Without further ado, the awards and my reaction!