NEO Agility Archive Appliance From Overland Storage/Sphere 3D

Sphere 3D Corp. announced that its subsidiary Overland Storage has introduced its NEO Agility archive appliance which leverages the LTFS technology and the Tape Archive (TAR) format.

Users of this member of the NEO Series family of data archive solutions benefit from the ease of use of a standard file viewing system plus the economics and reliability that tape-based storage provides for large amounts of data.

The NEO Agility archive appliance provides drag and drop file access to up to 15PB of online storage capacity, and an unlimited amount of offline capacity. The product is designed to help users quickly archive and access the large amounts of data that needs to be managed and stored. It is compatible with all NEO tape libraries, as well as a range of tape library models manufactured by other vendors.

“We are seeing increasing demand by big healthcare, video surveillance, media and entertainment and other sectors for ultra-high capacity data systems to support the uploading and downloading of multi-terabyte images and video feeds. This ongoing growth in file sizes and storage capacity demands makes now the perfect time to launch NEO Agility,” stated Peri Grover, senior director, NEO product management, Overland. “This product also opens new doors for our network of channel partners to break into new accounts as it is compatible with many different tape library models and vendors, unlike other LTFS vendors that limit interoperability to support only their own specific vendor libraries.“

For video archiving, the appliance can store up to 5TB of new video assets per day, as well as restore up to 20TB of video assets per day, but at a lower cost per terabyte when compared to standard file based systems with no LTFS component. To give additional context on its cost-efficiency for typical post-production video files, the NEO Agility appliance enables the equivalent of 100 video disks to be stored on one LTO tape cartridge.

Another target use case for NEO Agility is healthcare data archiving and storage. Before the end of this year, Frost and Sullivan estimates that the United States alone will generate more than 1,000PB of medical image data on a yearly basis. This amount of data equates to approximately 600 million medical imaging procedures per year.

NEO Agility makes tape simple by integrating with users’ existing file-based applications and not requiring the complex attachment of metadata nor any additional modification of their files. Users benefit from the ease of access of having multiple petabytes of storage sitting right there in their OS directory tree, allowing them to quickly and easily archive, restore and share files between multiple users and/or locations, at low cost for long-term storage.

The NEO Agility archive appliance provides support for both the LTFS and TAR standards, allowing files to be presented in a standard file/folder structure that can be transferred to/from the archive using either standard Windows network protocol or FTP file transfers. This enables the user to take advantage of the cost-effective and reliability advantages of tape, while avoiding proprietary formats, preventing expensive vendor lock-in, eliminating the need for expensive third-party archive software applications, and enabling regulatory compliance by providing support for WORM cartridges. NEO Agility also simplifies the management of near-line disk, near-line tape and off-line tape by allowing an administrator to define policies for RAID caching that can be tailored for different file types and folders.

NEO Agility technical specifications include:

• Compatible with all NEO tape libraries, including the NEOXL 80, NEOXL 60, and NEOs T48 models, as well as a range of tape library models manufactured by other vendors

• Storage of up to 15PB of online capacity, and an unlimited amount of offline capacity

• 8TB of disk cache designed to enhance archive and restore performance

• Sustainable transfer rates range from 500Mb/s to 1,300 Mb/s for files ranging in size from one to 100GB

• Redundancy for enhanced data availability

• High-speed network connections, like SAS and FC

• The ability to locally connect storage devices via USB allowing files to be transferred locally between the USB device and LTO

• Support for standard network protocols (CIFS/SMB and FTP); can be set up as a NAS share

• Interoperable with Windows, Linux, and Mac file environments

Click to enlarge

NEO Agility is available through Overland Storage authorized FastTrack program channel partners. The archive appliance has an MSRP starting at $29,000 and €26,500.