News Release

SAN DIEGO, Feb 4, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Overland Data Inc.(R) (Nasdaq:OVRL), a market leader in enterprise and mid-range tape automation solutions, today announced its Neo series(TM) LXN2000(TM) tape library is the recipient of this year's Arkeia Power Award(TM) for departmental excellence in a Linux environment.

The award was bestowed at LinuxWorld Expo, held last week in New York City.

The Arkeia Power Award, created and distributed by Knox Software Corp.(R), uses objective, formula-based benchmarking analysis to determine the best price-to-performance storage hardware library in a Linux-powered storage network. With a score of 8.64, Overland turned in the highest category score of all participants.

"We are very pleased to be this year's recipient of the Arkeia Power Award," said Dave Morton, director of product management, Overland Data. "Our expandable Neo tape library provides a powerful yet easy-to-use storage solution for a wide range of mission critical data backup and restoration requirements."

The Awards were created to provide an independent, real-world objective analysis of the performance and cost comparison of the various hardware manufacturers in the storage library marketplace.

"Utilizing our own certification lab we can measure the performance of various manufacturer hardware and benchmark that performance against competing manufacturers," noted Knox Software's Jay Jason Bartlett, director of strategic relations.

"We continually receive requests from our customers asking us which library hardware we recommend. With the Arkeia Power Award we are able to objectively showcase real-world conditions that our customers would understand and allow for an informed buying decision," stated Knox Software CEO Philippe Roussel.

The Arkeia PowerAwards are delivered twice a year at the LinuxWorld Expos. Overland's award will be presented at the LinuxWorld Expo in New York City on January 30th. Other benchmarking data and winners will also be on display. The complete list of award categories and winners is available on the Arkeia Web site: http://www.arkeia.com/apa.html.

    About Neo

Overland's easy-to-use Neo LXN2000 and LXN4000 were the first tape libraries to support serverless backup and restore functions over a 2 Gb/s SAN. This innovative capability is standard with all Fibre-ready Neo libraries, which have proven to provide non-stop operation, expansion on demand and investment protection. Other features unique to Overland's Fibre Channel architecture include independent ports that can be grouped as pairs, providing dual path redundancy for mission critical backup needs, and scalability supporting up to eight 2 Gb/s ports capable of over 1.2 Gigabytes per second of sustained Fibre Channel bandwidth for today's and tomorrow's high performance tape technology.

Key benefits of Overland's 2 Gb/s serverless backup technology include:

    --  Plug and Play, no software keys or additional cost
    --  Supports up to nine concurrent serverless backup streams per
        port
    --  Provides investment protection by supporting both 1-2 Gb/s
        SANs
    --  Certified with existing serverless configurations of CA's
        BrightStor and ArcServe
    About Overland

Overland Data Inc. (Nasdaq:OVRL) is a global supplier of innovative data storage and storage automation solutions for computer networks. The company's reputation for delivering high availability products, as well as its award-winning SmartScale Storage(R) architecture, which set the standard for intelligent automated storage and scalability, has established Overland as a leader in the mid-range tape automation market. Overland sells its products worldwide through leading OEMs, commercial distributors, storage integrators and value-added resellers.

    About Knox Software

Noted for its early and comprehensive support for the Linux open source operating system, Knox Software is a leading provider of enterprise network backup solutions. Founded in 1996, the company's mission is to provide fast, reliable, easy-to-use and affordable network backup solutions for heterogeneous networks. Knox Software is privately held and has offices in Carlsbad, Calif. and Paris. For further information about Arkeia and Knox Software, please visit Knox's Web site at http://www.arkeia.com or send an email to press@arkeia.com.

Overland Data, Neo, LXN2000, LXN4000 and SmartScaleStorage are trademarks or registered trademarks of Overland Data Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

CONTACT:          Overland Data Inc.  
                  Cynthia Bond / Vernon LoForti (Investor Relations)
                  858/571-5555
                  cbond@overlanddata.com / vloforti@overlanddata.com  
                  www.overlanddata.com 
                  or
                  Mentus Inc.                                 
                  Chris Dale (Public Relations)
                  858/455-5500
                  cdale@mentusonline.com
                  www.mentusonline.com

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