Versatile REO 4000 Backup and Recovery Appliance With NEO 2000 Tape Library Exceed Expectations of Leading Oil & Gas Company
SAN DIEGO, June 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL), the leading provider of backup and recovery solutions, today announced that Hunt Petroleum Corporation, a pioneer in the oil and gas industry, has implemented its REO 4000(TM) backup and recovery appliance in conjunction with its NEO 2000(TM) tape library to strengthen the organization's information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies. To that end, Overland's highly flexible REO and NEO play a pivotal role in protecting crucial geophysical data, while streamlining storage costs and improving management efficiencies.
Hunt Petroleum, a well-known domestic exploration and production company dating back almost 50 years, has a strong presence throughout Texas, Louisiana, North Dakota and the Gulf of Mexico. The company deploys leading- edge technology, including a number of industry-specific applications, to meet the highly specialized requirements of its geologists and geophysicists, who use sophisticated, storage-intensive modeling and imaging applications. Rapid business growth caused Hunt Petroleum's critical data to rise by more than 30 percent annually, which strained existing storage resources while compromising backup and recovery procedures.
Hunt Petroleum set out to align its storage infrastructure with the company's burgeoning business. "We were running out of disk space on our primary storage array, while backup and recovery operations took far too long," recalls Darrin Edgerton, a network administrator for Hunt Petroleum.
In seeking a more effective and economical method to manage storage growth, Hunt Petroleum first looked at Overland's NEO tape library as a replacement for an older Overland tape autoloader. The reliability of the initial Overland system along with the company's strong service and support record prompted Hunt Petroleum to upgrade to a modular Overland NEO 2000. Next, the IT team evaluated Overland's REO backup and recovery appliance, which offered disk-to-disk backup and recovery functionality similar to enterprise systems costing twice as much. Together, the versatile REO and scalable NEO provided affordable storage with greatly improved backup and recovery.
"Overland's REO and NEO give us the flexibility to grow our Windows, Linux and Unix tier-two storage on-the-fly, while reducing our backup and recovery window by more than 60 percent," says Edgerton. Dallas Digital Services, a Texas-based Overland Storage value-added reseller, facilitated the sale.
Prior to its REO/NEO implementation, Hunt Petroleum's IT team spent more than two days conducting full backups to tape, a process that encroached into prime-time production hours. Now, a full disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) backup is completed in about eight hours. Meanwhile, data files can now be restored almost instantaneously, streamlined by Overland's compatibility with Hunt Petroleum's Legato backup and recovery software.
With three REOs in place currently and more planned for the future, Hunt Petroleum achieves disk-speed data recovery while better leveraging its existing investment in an expensive Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN). "We plan to offload tier-two storage onto the REO so that we can maximize storage utilization on the Fibre Channel SAN, which saves us time and money," explains Edgerton. "In a very short period of time, Overland's REO/NEO solution has exceeded all our expectations. We are exploring new ways to use these systems to further simplify disaster recovery and ensure business continuance."
"Compatibility across platforms was very important to us, since we have a mixed environment with Windows and UNIX-based storage on SAN and direct- attached systems," commented Kent Jackson, network supervisor, Hunt Petroleum. "Standardizing on the REO/NEO solution has allowed us to refocus on projects that add value and function with the assurance that our line of business data is protected."
Overland's REO and NEO are an ideal solution to boost corporate ILM strategies by enabling companies to maintain economical information storage while ensuring optimum levels of availability. "Increasing numbers of organizations such as Hunt Petroleum are fortifying their ILM plans and safeguarding critical data with our powerful yet affordable D2D2T solutions," said John Matze, vice president and chief technology officer, Overland Storage. "Our products support high-end features typically reserved for much more expensive enterprise systems. This eases the burden of keeping up with rapid data growth, implementing full disaster recovery plans and complying with the latest regulatory rulings."
Introduced in April 2004, the REO 4000 incorporates high-capacity, serial ATA disks, specialized management and virtualization software, both iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity, and RAID 5 capabilities. The NEO 2000 minimizes costly downtime and keeps pace with rapidly expanding requirements with each module supporting up to 26 SDLT or 30 LTO cartridge slots and up to two tape drives, providing up to 15.6 TB of capacity. When integrated, the REO and NEO series offer one of the most comprehensive yet cost-effective D2D2T solutions on the market.
The REO 4000 and NEO 2000 are available through Overland Storage partners worldwide. For more information, please visit www.overlandstorage.com.
About Overland Storage
For nearly 25 years, Overland Storage has delivered world-class data protection solutions designed to ensure business continuity. Focused on backup and recovery, Overland's award-winning data protection solutions include the REO SERIES(TM) of disk-based backup and recovery appliances and the NEO SERIES(TM) of tape libraries. Overland Storage sells its products worldwide through leading OEMs, commercial distributors, storage integrators and value-added resellers. For more information, visit Overland's web site at www.overlandstorage.com.
Except for the factual statements made herein, the information contained in this news release consists of forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Words and expressions reflecting optimism and satisfaction with current prospects, as well as words such as "believe," "intends," "expects," "plans," "anticipates" and variations thereof, identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean that a statement is not forward looking. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and the company's actual results could differ materially from those contained in such statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include delays, unbudgeted expenses, inefficiencies and production problems that may result from the transition of manufacturing to Sanmina-SCI; difficulty of predicting sales to the company's major OEM customer; worldwide information technology spending levels; unexpected shortages of critical components; rescheduling or cancellation of customer orders; loss of a major customer; the market acceptance of the company's REO product line; delays in new product introductions by the company, including the company's new software PACs and REO operating system; the timing and market acceptance of new product introductions by competitors; the timing and amount of licensing royalties; general competition and price pressures in the marketplace; the company's ability to control costs and expenses; and general economic conditions. Reference is also made to other factors set forth in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the "Risk Factors," "Management's Discussion and Analysis" and other sections of the company's Form 10-K for the most recently completed fiscal year. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this release and the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events or circumstances after the date of this release.
Overland, Overland Storage, REO SERIES and NEO SERIES are trademarks or registered trademarks of Overland Storage, Inc.
SOURCE Overland Storage, Inc.
06/01/2005
CONTACT: Melinda Hutcheon, PR Manager of Overland Storage, Inc.,
+1-858-495-4187, mhutcheon@overlandstorage.com; or Jamie Ernst of Brodeur,
+1-210-495-5757, jernst@brodeur.com, for Overland Storage, Inc. Web site: http://www.overlandstorage.com
