Overland Storage Reaches Out To Enterprise

Overland Storage moved into enterprise storage on Wednesday with the launch of two new network attached storage appliances.

The company, which has until now been entrenched in the entry- and mid-range storage market, is introducing the SnapSAN 3000 and 5000 arrays, which scale to as much as 288TB and compete with arrays such as the Dell EqualLogic 4100, HP's Enterprise Virtual Array P6300, and the EMC VNX 5100. The 3000 and 5000 arrays are designed for customers with virtualized environments, I/O intensive applications, and regulatory compliance requirements.

Both the SnapSAN 3000 and the 5000 include thin provisioning, volume cloning, replication, snapshots, and drive power-down capabilities. The SnapSAN 5000 also ships with AutoTier, AutoCache, AutoTune, and Compliance features.

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AutoTier analyzes performance trends and moves data from tier to tier of storage based on policy decisions.

AutoCache is used when solid state drives are deployed to increase performance and resolve I/O bottlenecks. Overland says that 3-5% of application data accounts for approximately 50% of all I/O activity, and keeping this data on SSD storage can increase application performance by as much as 30 to 40%.

AutoTune detects and resolves bottlenecks that can be resolved with AutoTier and lets administrators monitor, analyze, and optimize performance.

Finally, Compliance allows use of encrypted Serial Attached SCSI (SCSI) drives to protect against data deletion or malicious activity. With Compliance, retention times can be specified to protect data until it is deleted, moved, or modified.

The SnapSAN 3000 has 4GB of cache memory per controller and accommodates solid state, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), near-line SAS, and encrypted SAS drives. It supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60, and RAID Triple Mirror (TM), and is certified with Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix.

The SnapSAN 5000 is the more enterprise-oriented array of the two appliances. It features the same type of disk drives as the SnapSAN 3000, but has 8GB of cache memory per controller. It also includes the AutoCache, AutoTune, AutoTier and WORM capabilities, as well as different connectivity options. While the SnapSAN 3000 can connect to the network via 1/10 GbE iSCSI, 8GB Fibre Channel, or 6Gb SAS, the 6000 can connect in any combination of ways.

Both appliances are available now. The SnapSAN 3000 starts at $13,999 and the SnapSAN 5000 starts at $16,999.

Editor's note: Updated story to correct starting price of SnapSAN 3000.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.

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