History 2003: Overland Looking to Diversify Like Most Other Tape Library Manufacturers

Looking to diversify like most other tape library manufacturers, Overland Storage had already made its first foray into storage management software, concluding distribution agreements with Astrum Software and Prisa Networks. These turned out to be such good choices that both start-ups have since been gobbled up by EMC.

Until now this strategy of diversification, far too timid, has not resulted in any noticeable increase in revenues. This time, however, by investing more substantially in an acquisition, and a business activity closer to its own, Overland hopes to avoid the same pitfalls, with results both more significant and more certain in the long term.

So who is Okapi Software, based in the same city as Overland, San Diego, CA, and acquired by the latter for a mere $5 million in a mixed stock and cash transaction? The start-up, founded in February 2002, has designed a product that offers perfect complementarity with Overland’s tape automation products. It’s a 2U appliance, at a price in the $15,000 range, to accelerate disk-to-disk-to-tape backup using 8x250GB SATA drives in JBOD or RAID-1 and iSCSI connections of up to 8 servers. It can work with all the popular backup software from BakBone, CA, CommVault, Legato or Veritas.

According to Overland, this D2D2T appliance can reduce backup times from 50% to 95%, and the restoration is at disk speed.

The patent-pending technology behind the device is a volume-sharing mechanism that takes advantage of block device performance during data transfer to backup first to disk and then to tape.

In addition to a technology, Overland is getting the services of Okapi founder, president and CEO John Matze, as its new CTO, which can only help the company with its diversification plans. Indeed, the man has 14 years of experience in the storage sector, having held positions at Veritas and Stac, and serving as CTO of StoneFly Networks. He is one of the original architects of the iSCSI standard.

Okapi had previously signed several distributors for its appliance including Arkay Storage Solutions, Cambridge Computer, HA Storage, HorizonTek, MPAK Technologies, NCE and Promethean Data Solutions.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 187 on August 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.