Overland Unveils REO Compass Disk Appliance to Simplify Data Mobility for Improved Remote Data Protection and Backup Consolidati

Overland Storage, Inc. (NASDAQ:OVRL) today unveiled the REO(R) Compass, a revolutionary, disk-based appliance that moves backup data efficiently and securely between remote sites while seamlessly integrating with existing backup software, policies, VTLs and physical tape libraries. REO Compass eases the consolidation of data backups from remote sites to a central location for global, optimized backups across all offices and data centers.

REO Compass combines block-based data deduplication with compression and AES encryption to transport data between locations with minimal bandwidth and maximum security. Centralized management of all REO Compass appliances facilitates wide-area backup and recovery by enabling administrators to manage data movement policies at multiple sites from a single interface. This unified control over remote and local data backups and recoveries eliminates the need to ship backup tapes to headquarters or incur costly, manual intervention at remote offices.

Additional data protection innovations provided by REO Compass include:

- - Automated, policy-based and capacity-optimized backup data movement;

- - Standards-based backup catalog integration;

- - Consolidated media tracking and audit trails;

- - Ability to assign customized data movement policies to backup policies;

- - Web-based interface to streamline setup and management for "set it and forget it" operation; and

- - Data integrity with authentication and secondary verification.

According to Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Overland Storage, the new REO Compass addresses the unique challenges of remote data protection and backup consolidation while filling critical gaps in current solutions. "Exponential data growth, along with low- bandwidth connectivity and limited IT resources at remote sites, makes it exceedingly difficult for companies to ensure adequate protection of dispersed data," he explains. "With REO Compass, Overland is answering the call by simplifying data mobility with a purpose-built appliance that makes it easy and economical to automate, manage and integrate the movement of backup data across a WAN."

REO Compass is available in two rackmount configurations that leverage the simplicity of the REO appliance family for expedited deployment and streamlined operation. The REO Compass 100 is a 1U appliance with four enterprise-class SATA hard disk drives, RAID 5 and iSCSI host connectivity. REO Compass 500 is a 2U appliance with 12 enterprise-class SATA drives with iSCSI and optional Fibre Channel host connectivity. Data deduplication, compression and encryption features come standard with both REO Compass models.

According to Dave Reinsel, group vice president of IDC's storage and semiconductor research groups, organizations of all sizes have an increasing need to transport backups from remote locations to a central site to achieve greater data consolidation and long-term archival. "Small- to medium-sized businesses can be particularly vulnerable to the risks of data loss when trying to consolidate backups as they often lack sufficient infrastructure and remote IT personnel to manage what has been traditionally a heavily manual effort," he says. "With REO Compass, Overland is advancing the REO platform with a broad set of capabilities and additional automation to ease remote backups while enabling both remote and local data recovery."

Overland's REO Compass will be available in December from Overland's channel partners worldwide with a starting MSRP of $5,107.

About Overland Storage

Overland Storage provides affordable end-to-end data protection solutions that are engineered to store smarter, protect faster and extend anywhere -- across networked storage, media types, and multi-site environments. Overland Storage products include award-winning NEO SERIES(R) and ARCvault(TM) tape libraries, REO SERIES(R) disk-based backup and recovery appliances with VTL capabilities, Snap Server(R) NAS appliances, and ULTAMUS(TM) RAID high-performance, high-density storage. Overland sells its products through leading OEMs, commercial distributors, storage integrators and value-added resellers. For more information, visit Overland's web site at http://www.overlandstorage.com/