Overland still shovelling cash into tape

Storage company revs Neo

New mid-range tape libraries from Overland Storage indicate older models may be heading for the chip, and show there's life in the supposedly moribund tape dog yet.

NEO 600s and 800s products, with four and six drives respectively, put the older 2-drive 2000e and 4-drive 4000e at risk.

The new libraries slot in above the NEO 200s and 400s, with up to two and four drives respectively. The 600s has 72 cartridge slots and stores up to 216TB. The 800s has 96 slots and stores up to 288TB.

These capacities – compressed capacities by the way – appear to make the 90TB 2000e and 180TB 4000e redundant. The range-topping 8000e, storing up to a 1.5PB, keeps its role.

The 600s has a 6U form factor while the 800s has an 8U enclosure. These represent more space-efficient packages than the 5U 2000e and 10U 4000e. It is not hard to imagine a future product extending the 800s product further up the scale, closing the gap between it and the 8000e.

Overland has restricted the interfaces to SAS and Fibre Channel, dropping SCSI. LTO-5 is the only supported format. The maximum data transfer rates are 4Tb/ hour and 6TB/hour for the 600s and 800s respectively. These numbers again point to the inefficiencies of the 2000e an 4000e, which have transfer rates of 2TB/hour an 4TB/hour respectively.

Overland quotes Enterprise Strategy Group research indicating tape's lead over internal disk for archiving is expected to grow during the next five years, with 45 per cent annual growth by 2015.

NEO 600s and 800s products are available immediately with a starting suggested retail price of £9,999 and are included in Overland’s “Trade Up and Save” promotion, which offers customers up to £1,375 in cash rebates for a limited time. ®