It’s been a long, strange trip for Overland Storage (NASDAQ: OVRL). 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?

Snap and Overland – Hot Potato on a Sinking Ship?

The future of Overland is tied to Snap Appliance, makers of entry-level network-attached storage (NAS) systems. Current Overland CEO, Eric Kelly, snapped up the company in 2002 for just $10 million, quickly flipping it to Adaptec for $100 million. But the storage system market wasn’t right for the controller maker, so Kelly stepped up and directed Overland to repurchase Snap in 2008.

With Overland running a reported 70% of its business through Hewlett-Packard, that company’s decision to switch suppliers represented a potentially life-threatening challenge. Losses rang up and the company’s stock was pummeled. Shares of OVRL traded over $20 in 2006, but had slipped below $3 in 2008. Earnings declined, slipping into the red in the fourth quarter of 2005. The company hasn’t reported a profit since 2006 and the 2009 balance sheet shows a net negative total equity.

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The situation at Overland apparently does not appear quite as bleak to insiders. Eric Kelly stepped up to the helm as CEO in January of 2009 and quickly set about assembling a new management team. He brought in former Snap and Data Robotics marketing whiz Jillian Mansolf in July, presumably to focus on the Snap Appliance storage systems.

Overland NEO 4000E

Now Overland has taken another step, appointing BlueArc and Data Robotics founder Geoff Barrall as CTO and VP of Engineering. Kelly, Barrall, and Mansolf are a formidable team, lending the company the credibility it needs to steer Overland out of trouble.

Overland is in the process of expanding its Snap operations and moving it from Milpitas to San Jose. This month, the company revamped its NEO tape libraries and launched a new line of Snap appliances featuring enhanced support for VMware and Hyper-V. Overland also outsourced product manufacturing to Foxconn, improving gross product profitability.

On the financial front, Overland shored up its finances with $12 million in private equity funding on February 22.

Overland REO 9100 VTL

A Full-Line Storage Company?

Although known primarily for its NEO line of tape libraries, Overland has a much broader product portfolio. The company sells a line of virtual tape libraries that once used IBM’s Diligent deduplication technology but this relationship is long over.

The Snap line has expanded into both NAS and iSCSI SAN primary storage arrays as well. Although the low-end 2-drive SnapServer 110 might not look like much, the rack-mount SnapServer 600 series can be expanded over 100 TB. This is accomplished by adding storage expansion chassis behind the slim 1U SnapServer head, but we suspect I/O capacity and reliability will be limited when daisy chaining seven expansion units on a single SAS port.

Overland Snap Server 210

Overland’s storage lineup puts it squarely into the exploding small- and medium-sized business storage market. With server virtualization and database applications demanding ever more capacity and performance, many smaller IT operations are looking to add networked storage. But even the entry-level products of storage titans like EMC and NetApp are out of reach for these small shops, leaving a hole in the market. Companies like Overland are rushing to take advantage of this market with devices like the SnapServer, Data Robotics’ Drobo Elite, and EMC’s Iomega ix4 line. Those that offer low cost, ease of use, and integration with Windows and VMware are likely to be very successful over the next few years.

Overland may just surprise us all with a serious resurgence. CEO Kelly has lined up a great management team, brought in extra cash, and refocused the company on a nascent market opportunity. Not bad for a company many had long written off!

Listen to Overland CEO Eric Kelly on the InfoSmack podcast

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Rebirth of Overland Storage
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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.

Unlike IBRIX, which sold software to transform commodity hardware into a clustered NAS solution, ONStor designed both the hardware and software included in their home-grown products. The company also re-sold Fujitsu’s Eternus and Nexsan SATA storage systems and Tek-Tools software. ONStor raised $80 million in its 9 years of operation.

LSI has found success supplying hardware components to the storage and networking markets. In April, the company purchased the 3ware RAID adapter business from AMCC. LSI’s storage operations were to be spun out as Engenio in a 2004 IPO that never happened. That operation later re-joined the LSI mothership, combining with the storage controller business. This is where ONStor will land as well. LSI manufactures components on an OEM basis for many in the storage industry, including BlueArc, IBM, MaXXan, Sepaton, and Sun.

What does LSI get for their $25 million?

• ONStor’s EverON software, which powers its NAS and IP storage product lines and includes the StorFS scalable file system. EverON offers clustering with a global namespace, automated pooling and provisioning, and snapshots.
• The Bobcat and Cougar Broadcom-powered NAS gateway hardware platforms offer energy-efficient and scalable virtualized and clustered NAS in front of existing SAN or NAS storage capacity using the EverON OS.
• The Pantera system uses Intel Xeon CPUs and adds iSCSI to the mix. It uses a different operating system which leverages ZFS.
• ONStor also re-sold the Fujitsu Eternus 2000 and 4000 Fibre Channel SAN storage systems.

LSI is likely to be eager to leverage the EverON software and Bobcat/Cougar platforms with their OEM partners. Expect many vendors (ahem: IBM) to quickly counter HP’s new IBRIX-powered scalable NAS with LSI-powered alternatives. The Pantera seems less-likely to be of interest to OEMs, being based on commodity hardware and software. And continuation of the Eternus line seems flat-out illogical.

More coverage: Terri McClure and Mark Peters of ESG

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | LSI Picks Up ONStor
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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! So a random stream of consciousness produced the following!

• Reliability – DMX-like reliability and robustness
• Scalability – DMX-like scalability for block, IBM SOFS for NAS
• Performance – DMX-like performance for block, BlueArc for NAS
• Flexibility – Support for all protocols in a common consistent manner like OnTap
• Thin Provisioning – 3Par’s thin provisioning
• Wide Striping – Genuine wide-stripping across ALL Spindles not just a proportion or across groups of spindles – Think 3Par
• Automated Storage Tiering – Think Compellant on steroids!
• Automated Optimisation – Think 3Par
• Dedupe – Dedupe at block or file level – not seen a truly great dedupe solution yet
• Scalable Heterogeneous Support – IBM SVC or HDS
• Minimal-performance impacting Snapshots – think NetApp or….Sun
• Writeable Thin Clones – think LSI’s DPM8400
• Synchronous Replication – think SRDF
• Asynchronous Replication – think of something which works without a huge amount of work
• Provisioning interface – think XIV, think 3Par
• Analytics – think Sun
• Monitoring/reporting – think Onaro
• Cost – think PC World (who are too expensive to but you get the idea!)

So a merger between IBM/EMC/HDS/NetApp/Sun/Compellant/BlueArc/LSI/3Par would be a great start. Let’s throw Cisco into the mix as well for a unified data-centre fabric and we’re done!

What features do you want to see? I’d love to know!

And vendors, without too much marchitecture, what are your killer features? The things that you are most proud of? I don’t want a big bragging list but what’s the one problem you think you’ve solved which you are most proud of?

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Perfection…
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TechTarget's annual Storage Product of the Year awards have been announced!

The mainstream media is still digesting the Oscar awards, but we in storage had our own announcement this week: TechTarget’s (now PDF) Storage magazine announced their Storage Products of the Year award for 2008.

Without further ado, the awards and my reaction!

Disk and disk subsystems

A category of much annual contention, the gold award went deservedly to the BlueArc Titan 3200. BlueArc’s product range is small, with just a few systems on offer, but the 3200 was indeed a major upgrade. The bronze-placed Hitachi Data Systems AMS 2000 might easily have taken the top award as well, however, introducing major advancements in the midrange market. Taking silver was the news-making Intel X25-E SATA Solid-State Drive.

The placement of disk drives in the same category as SAN and NAS storage systems, however, highlights something of a categorization problem for this award. Should Seagate, STEC, and Intel really be battling it out with the very systems that use their drives? I’d like to see separate component and array categories in the future.

Overlooked finalists in this category were EMC’s CLARiiON CX4, IBM’s XIV, Isilon’s X-Series, 3PAR’s T-Class, and Xiotech’s Emprise 7000. Any of these might have placed, and 3PAR, IBM, and Xiotech might have taken gold with a different set of judges. Looking at this broad list, however, highlights the difficulty in this award. BlueArc, HDS, and Intel deserved praise, but the rest should be recognized as well!

Storage management tools

VMware takes a deserved gold award for Storage vMotion, certainly the MVP in storage software this year if one considers adoption and impact. Silver went to NetApp’s Deduplication technology, the first (and still only) deduplication certified for primary storage use. Bronze went to CloudNAS from Nirvanix, an addition that allowed the storage service provider to offer services using standard NAS protocols.

EMC’s integration of VMware with ControlCenter 6.1 deserved recognition as well, as did Mimosa’s updated NearPoint 3.5. One really overlooked product is SANPulse Technologies‘ SANlogics 2.0 – go check it out and let me know if you think it deserved to place!

Networking equipment

If you haven’t experienced Riverbed’s gold-winning Optimization System (RiOS) 5.0, you might not understand just what the big deal is. 5.5 might win again next year, with solid updates to accelerate even tough WAN traffic like encrypted MAPI and signed SMB.

The silver award went to Brocade’s DCX Backbone, but time will tell if this is a wiser choice than rival Cisco’s updated MDS. I suppose if we compare only the updated DCX to what little Cisco did to the MDS last year, Brocade clearly gets the nod. But I might have skipped both products to let IBM’s updated SAN Volume Controller (SVC) have a place on this list. It added thin provisioning last year and remains IBM’s best storage product.

Bronze-winning NetEx HyperIP 5.5 could easily have taken top honors – it’s a real value for the money in WAN acceleration! Compared to Riverbed on features it doesn’t look like much, but compare price quotes and see if your head doesn’t spin!

Backup and disaster recovery software and services

VMware continued their roll with a gold medal for Site Recovery Manager 1.0. Like Storage vMotion, SRM came out strong to widespread acclaim, and is likely to have a major impact in the coming years. A solid choice.

FalconStor claims silver with their Network Storage Server (NSS) 6.0 platform. I’m puzzled by the placement of this product in the backup and DR category, but what can you do? Bronze went to Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange, a product I don’t know much about. Must be good, though!

Backup hardware

Data Domain is everywhere lately, and their DD690 Deduplication Storage System picked up a gold medal here. I hear that these things are selling like crazy, though, which I’m sure Data Domain is happier with than the award! Permabit took silver with their Enterprise Archive Data Center Series. Lots of folks who know more about the backup space than I have had good things to say about it, as well as the bronze-winning Quantum DXi7500.

Although backup isn’t my thing, I wanted to point out that Cleversafe deserved mention with their, well, clever Dispersed Storage Network.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Reacting to the 2008 Storage Products of the Year
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