Overland Storage Introduces REO Business Continuity Appliance to Offer SMBs Simple, Economical Protection of Servers, Applications & Data

Overland Storage, Inc. today introduced the REO® Business Continuity Appliance (BCA), an innovative, all-in-one solution that offers small and medium-sized businesses a highly affordable, streamlined approach for protecting mission-critical applications and data as well as physical and virtual server environments. The new REO BCA leverages Overland’s award-winning REO® SERIES disk-based backup and recovery VTL to integrate a single, cost-effective appliance with a streamlined approach for simplifying both continuous local backup and remote disaster recovery.

REO BCA automates the reliable recovery of vital data and applications at both the local data center and remote disaster recovery sites by combining capacity-optimized replication technology with comprehensive application-aware failover and failback. The result is non-disruptive, continuous availability of core business applications, such as email, databases and unstructured files, along with the ability to recover from any point in time or event. Additionally, patented point-in-time “book marking” technology enables “near-zero” Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives (RPO/RTO).

Other unique REO BCA features designed to deliver heightened yet affordable and uncomplicated business continuity include:

• Seamless integration with Windows/Linux file services, Microsoft Exchange and SQL as well as complete support of virtualized environments, including VMware, and Hyper-V;
• Non-disruptive server, application and data migration for maximizing existing and new infrastructure investments;
• Server, storage and network hardware independence to facilitate tiered storage strategies for robust disaster recovery; and
• Centralized management and reporting, including an Environmental Profiler for analyzing data, network and storage resource utilization.

According to Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of worldwide marketing for Overland Storage, REO BCA raises the business continuity bar for SMBs with its integrated, all-in-one approach. "We’ve extended our data protection capabilities with a solutions-centric offering that ensures mission-critical data and applications are always protected without the additional cost and complexity of host- and array-based business continuity,” he says. “In doing so, Overland provides its global channel partners with a highly economical, easy to deploy and manage solution that meets end-users’ current SLAs while providing valuable insight into trends and resources so they can anticipate and more effectively address ever-increasing business requirements."

Overland’s REO BCA is the focal point of a recently fortified disaster recovery infrastructure at RSUI, a leading insurance underwriter based in Atlanta. RSUI already relied on Overland’s REO 9100c disk-based backup and recovery appliance with compression along with the company’s NEO 4000 tape automation appliance for disk-to-disk-to-tape data protection and SOX compliance. With the new REO BCA, RSUI is elevating its business continuity capabilities significantly with real-time replication of its physical and virtual environment as well as mission-critical email and SQL databases.

For Ed Craig, senior network architect for RSUI, Overland’s REO BCA has lowered the barriers to bringing continuous data replication into his environment. “REO BCA is a one-stop solution that does it all—physical to virtual replication, block-level transfers, push-button failover and failback, load balancing, WAN optimization and more,” he says. “The appliance fit perfectly into our environment and has been instrumental in helping us get much more aggressive with our SLAs, reducing our window of data and application recovery from two to three days to less than 12 hours.”

"Despite the budget pressures brought on by current economic difficulties, organizations of all sizes know that now is when they need to be even more responsive to customers. Ensuring that all of their IT applications are protected and quickly recoverable is a critical requirement," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research at IDC. "Solutions like Overland's REO BCA that are designed and priced for small and mid-sized business will make it make it more practical for IT managers to deploy robust data protection for their physical and virtual server environments."

Availability and Pricing
Overland’s REO BCA comes in two configurations: REO BCA 100, a 1u appliance that starts with support for up to five application servers; and REO BCA 200, a 2u appliance that starts with support for up to 10 application servers. Application server filter drivers can be installed on new and existing application servers, requiring less than one percent resource utilization.

REO BCA is available now through BackupWorks.com for a starting solution MSRP of approximately $24,000.