Raincloud OS 4.1 for SnapScale by Overland

Overland Storage, Inc. announced the availability of Raincloud OS 4.1, an enterprise software for the company’s SnapScale series of geographically-distributed, clustered scale-out storage solutions that are optimized for cloud and distributed enterprise environments.

SnapScale X4

The Raincloud OS 4.1 is the software for SnapScale that includes software-defined storage services that automatically execute operational data management and data protection operations without requiring manual intervention. With its self-provisioning, self-balancing and self-healing capabilities, SnapScale’s storage resources grow and shrink based on user needs, and are distributed for optimal performance, and recovered or rebuilt without any downtime. The data mobility tools included in Raincloud OS 4.1 enable customers to build private clouds for sharing and synchronizing data for anywhere, anytime access.

“For a government agency, we selected a SnapScale scale-out solution from Overland Storage over other clustered NAS offerings due to its simplicity, scalability and strength of clustering functionality for distributed deployments,” said Frank Scott, sales manager, Premier Systems Ltd. “It enabled our customer to consolidate data from several servers and individual workstations deployed on their campus to backup into a shared NAS storage repository. The distributed clustered architecture of RAINcloud OS kept the project within budget, by eliminating the need for any expensive clustering and data protection software that is typically added by competing offerings. I am confident that the SnapScale with Rainloud OS solution will provide similar value to our other customers.“

SnapScale enterprise storage products have completed the VMware certification process for interoperability with vSphere 5.1 and 5.5. in a VMware-virtualized infrastructure.

“We are pleased that Overland Storage’s SnapScale products qualify for the VMware Ready logo, signifying to customers that it has met specific VMware integration and interoperability standards and it works effectively with the VMware cloud infrastructure, which will speed time to value within customer environments,” said Sanjay Katyal, VP global alliances & OEMs, Vmware, Inc.

The software-defined storage services in Raincloud OS 4.1
deliver new customer benefits including:

Performance and Security Services:

Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 improves read and write performance for Windows clients and servers when accessing SnapServer storage.
NFS version 4 provides performance enhancements and better security for UNIX users.
Windows-only Tree improves permission handling and authentication enabling Windows and UNIX/Mac users to easily share files in mixed environments.
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) allows administrators to set permissions and specify access to directories through name lookup to and from a unique user identifier (UID).

Manageability and Availability Services:

Highly-available with rolling updates provides 99.999% uptime with full system redundancy. After installing RAINcloud OS 4.1, future software versions automatically occur without requiring a cluster reboot or shut down.
Performance monitoring with history allows administrators to run performance reports over specified time periods to optimize throughput and minimize network bottlenecks.
VMware version vSphere 5.1 and 5.5 certification for NFS and iSCSI allows administrators to consolidate storage and run VMs on a SnapScale cluster.

Data Protection Services:

CDP with High-Performance Snapshots. Enables efficient capacity utilization, and offers up to 3x improvements in write performance.
Create Private Cloud, Protect Data and Access it Anywhere. Enables customers to conveniently create their own private cloud without the hassle, risk and expense of a third-party cloud service.

“The SnapScale scale-out solution, with the new Raincloud OS 4.1 software, delivers on our vision to provide a software-defined IT infrastructure that enables customers with rapid or unpredictable data growth to infinitely scale capacity and performance without adding management complexity, even in geographically-distributed IT environments,” said Nilesh Patel, VP product management and product marketing, Overland Storage. “With tighter VMware integration, our partners and customers can confidently deploy SnapScale solutions for their virtualized infrastructures.”

Raincloud OS 4.1 software is available for download by existing SnapScale customers and embedded in all new SnapScale units.