Overland Storage, EMC Backup Products Make Good Time

A common feature of the appliances, one from Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC and the other from Overland Storage, San Diego, is that they offer tape emulation, which allows servers to back up data to the hard-drive-based appliances in native tape format without the need to modify application or backup software.

Disk-to-disk backup appliances can significantly speed the backup process, said Dave Holloway, vice president of sales at West Coast Technology, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based solution provider who has been working with Overland's REO series of appliances.

One customer who was taking 48 hours to back up 500 Gbytes of data cut that to six hours by implementing an REO 2000, released last year. Holloway said. "Instead of bringing data down the [network] to tape, he was moving data to disk from eight servers at a time."

Overland introduced its REO 4000 appliance to solution providers last week and plans to formally launch it in mid-April, said Peri Grover, director of product management. The REO 4000 offers up to 2 Tbytes of Serial ATA hard-drive capacity per module and connects to IP networks via iSCSI. It allows simultaneous connectivity to Fibre Channel networks and can be configured to emulate an LTO-2 tape drive, Grover said.

EMC, meanwhile, plans this week to introduce two appliances based on its Clariion arrays, said Sean Kinney, senior marketing manager. They allow streams of up to 80 MBps and aggregated backups at up to 425 MBps when emulating either ADIC DLT or SuperDLT, ATL LTO or LTO-2, or StorageTek 9840 or 9940 tape libraries.

Overland's appliances are sold through the channel, Grover said. The EMC appliances will be sold direct or via channel partners, with the probable exception of Dell, Kinney said.