Overland's Gives SMB's Business Continuity

Overland Storage has rolled out a new line of appliances focused onbusiness continuity for small and medium businesses.  The REO BusinessContinuity Appliance is designed as an all-in-one solution for smallerenterprises, offering real-time backup, replication, and failover oftheir key application servers.

Overland Storage is offering two models of the appliance, with astarting MSRP of $24,000: The REO BCA 100, a 1u appliance that startswith support for up to five application servers; and REO BCA 200, a 2uappliance that starts with support for up to 10 application servers.

In business continuity and disaster recovery circles, the two key measurements are the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).  RPO represents the gap between the last save point and the moment of the outage.  RTO is the time it takes from the moment of the outage until the full functionality is restored.  Typically, as an enterprise becomes more reliant on their infrastructure as a business necessity, both the RPO and RTO times become increasingly narrower, to the point where tape-based backups not sufficient.  

Overland's REO BCA is offering near zero RPO and RTO, first by providing transaction replication to the BCA on the local network, then replicating the changes to failover servers across the wide area network. The REO BCA supports a mix of physical and virtual servers, including VMware, Citrix and Microsoft's Hyper-V, so remote servers could be a number of virtual machines on a single physical server mirroring the servers at the primary site. To track both the impact of replicating data across the WAN, as well as to ensure that the defined recovery objectives are being met, the REO BCA offers the Environmental Profiler, which monitors network utilization, protection coverage and offers tools to meet their business continuity needs.

Lauren Whitehouse, Analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, notes that "Overland is offering a compelling enterprise-class data recovery solution, priced packaged at a level for small and medium businesses."At launch, Overland's REO BCA's supports application server filter drivers for Windows file services, Linux file services, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft SQL Server, which, according to the company, require less than one percent resource utilization on the application server.  Support for additional applications and services are expected to added down the road.   Also, beyond pure business continuity scenarios, the REO BCA also provides for local disk-to-disk backups, giving administrators the ability to quickly restore a deleted spreadsheet or other user files, without having to "restore from tape".