NAS Market to Reach $7.0 Billion by 2017

Global Industry Analysts, Inc., announces the release of a report, titled Network Attached Storage (NAS) Devices on NAS devices markets. Global market for NAS is projected to reach US$7.0 billion by the year 2017.

Growth will be primarily driven by the increase in the number of home and small business networks, continued data explosion, and the growing need for data backup and archiving.

In a knowledge driven era where information is the engine that drives enterprises worldwide, management of information is gaining utmost importance. Widespread implementation of CRM and ERP solutions have contributed towards enterprise data explosion by triggering exponential growth in the volume of information generated about partners, suppliers and customers. Other factors driving data growth and the ensuing storage needs include generation of rich media, regulatory compliance that mandates maintenance of audit trails, and financial data, and gargantuan email archives, given that email is a primary vehicle of business communication. Networked machines and processes additionally generate a steady stream of real time data, which adds to the information overload being confronted by modern companies.

While data storage remains an indispensable IT need, the growing magnitude of the importance of this very basic IT function can be put into perspective by the fact that information is currently multiplying at a rate of over 65% each year and total data generated worldwide is projected to reach over 3 million petabytes by the year 2020. Against this backdrop, the critical importance of data storage comes to the fore. As companies seek to overcome data storage performance limits, significant opportunities are in store for storage technologies like NAS devices.

NAS is one of the on-line storage architectures that promise to deliver businesses with cost-effective, scalable, and manageable alternatives for ever-growing data requirements. As a networked storage technology that allows connected host systems to share data, NAS devices have gained popularity in a short span of time, thanks to the range of benefits they offer. Advantages stacked in favor of the NAS technology include increase in data availability, improvements in server performance, optimized data access, end-user transparency, easy setup, low installation and maintenance costs and platform-independence.

Demand for NAS devices is forecast to be driven by the growing need for anytime, anywhere accessibility to corporate and internet networks. Emphasis on business continuity planning, growing adoption of remote and virtual office environments and the ensuing need to provide remote access to corporate networks to employees, is helping fuel the uptake of the NAS technology. Business continuity requires maintaining backup copies of primary data and NAS devices will find increased use as filers and backup targets in storing copies of user data. Integration of native deduplication abilities in NAS devices is additionally expected to enhance the use of NAS devices as backup targets. Data deduplication replaces duplicate files on the NAS network with tags/links referring to the original file. Reduction in volume of the data being actually stored on the NAS consequently reduces the amount of data that the NAS must access. Therefore, less head movement and less searching results in faster data access.

Demand is also expected to remain especially high among SMBs, as NAS devices provide a cost effective solution for these companies with are often saddled with issues, such as, limited access to financial and IT resources. Larger businesses are also gradually creeping into the spotlight as potentially lucrative clients for NAS vendors. The market is gradually witnessing transition from SMBs specific solutions to more advanced large enterprise-centric solutions. Unlike SMBs that adopt NAS solutions for core applications, large enterprises rely on NAS for less mission-critical applications, and for specific departments, workgroups and remote offices.

Technology innovations aimed at raising the performance bar of NAS devices is expected to benefit the market in the medium term. Cloud computing, in this regard, promises to expand the functionalities of NAS devices and eventually expand market opportunities in this space. Cloud NAS is currently waxing in popularity. As enterprises are now looking at deploying storage architecture, which lowers the total cost of ownership while improving ROI, the concept of cloud NAS is snowballing in the market. The key benefit of cloud NAS is the ability to access information instantaneously without the limitations of the physical location of the data. Advancements in key capabilities such as payment models, reliability, security and multi-tenancy are expected to increase the adoption of cloud storage in the upcoming years.

IT spending in Europe currently remains nervous with the mixed signals emanating from the handling of region's debt crisis driving the IT industry to swing between hopes and fears. At the extreme pessimistic end of the spectrum is the belief that if the debt and financial dominoes begin to fall across the core Euro-zone economies, IT spending could painfully crimp in technology sectors, such as, computing hardware, enterprise software and IT services. Even in the event of the European Union successfully resolving the Euro area debt crisis, slower and rather anemic growth will continue to haunt the region even into the future, primarily because the Euro crisis in reality masks a deeper financial and economic malaise built through years of unsustainable fiscal policies adopted by profligate governments in the Euro zone. Companies and enterprises in all industrial sectors are therefore expected to remain prepared for times of scarce financial resources. Austerity measures like increased taxes and higher costs of financing, will create fiscal pain, which in turn will take its toll on corporate IT spending. IT in the public sector, under such a scenario, is forecast to be acutely impacted, given the greater pressure faced by government owned companies to shed debt and prune down budgets. IT budget cuts, project cancellations, postponements and the general tendency to do more with less will act as a drag on IT spending.

Currently, however, as the 'Business Climate Indicator', a key pillar of growth in the market, improves in the European Union reflective of the guarded optimism prevailing in the marketplace, there exist little signs of changes in corporate spending on critical IT products and services. Against this backdrop, outlook NAS devices remains positive with demand largely expected to hold up in the year 2012.

As stated by the new market research report on NAS devices, North America represents the largest market worldwide. Strong future growth is however expected to stem from Asia-Pacific. The region is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 14.1%, over the analysis period.

Major players in the global marketplace include Buffalo Inc., Dell Inc., EMC Corporation, Hewlett-Packard company, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, IBM Corporation, LSI Corporation, NetApp Inc., NetGear Inc., Overland Storage Inc., Panasas Inc., SGI Corporation , among others.

The research report provides a review of market trends, issues, drivers, company profiles, mergers, acquisitions and other strategic industry activities. It provides market estimates and projections (in $ millions) for major geographic markets including the North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of World. Market sectors analyzed include enterprise, departmental, and workgroup.

Overland Storage Fiscal 4Q10 Financial Results

Overland Storage, Inc. announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended June 30, 2010.

Overland Storage reported revenue of $19.3 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2010, an increase of 3.7% from the prior quarter. The net loss for the fourth fiscal quarter was $4.2 million. This includes $1.2 million of non-cash, stock compensation expense.

For the twelve months ended June 30, 2010, the company reported revenue of $77.7 million, compared with $105.6 million for the twelve months ended June 30, 2009. The net loss for fiscal year 2010 was $13.0 million, compared with a net loss of $18.0 million in the prior fiscal year.

Cash and cash equivalents as of June 30, 2010 were $8.9 million compared with $5.5 million as of June 30, 2009.

Eric Kelly, President and Chief Executive Officer of Overland Storage, said: " We are pleased to have stabilized revenues, as the growth of our strategic branded products and stability of our service business has helped to compensate for continuing declines in the OEM business and challenging global economic conditions. This provides the foundation necessary to drive future revenue growth."

Kelly added: "Looking ahead, we remain focused on three strategic priorities - implementing a new asset light business model, driving innovation and expanding our addressable markets. We look forward to describing key milestones in upcoming months and are pleased to resume providing forecasts of certain operating metrics."

Business Outlook
Based on information available as of August 26, 2010, Overland Storage is issuing guidance for the first half of fiscal 2011 as follows: the company expects first half revenue to be in the range of $35 million to $38 million, gross margin in the range of 27 to 31 percent and operating expenses in the range of $18 million to $20 million, including non cash stock compensation charges of $1 to $2 million. Our ability to continue to execute and hit our targeted milestones will assist us in our goal of becoming profitable during fiscal 2011.

Overland Storage Wins 'One To Watch' At the Storage Awards

Overland Storage has won the ‘One to Watch’ award with its SnapServer SAN S2000 at the 2010 Storage Awards held at The Tower Guoman Hotel, London. Overland Storage is a global provider of effortless data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle.

The Storage Awards are hosted by Storage Magazine, the UK’s leading storage industry publication. Readers of Storage Magazine, who pick the winners by popular vote, cast more than 25,000 votes across a wide range of storage categories.

Andy Walsky, vice president of sales and marketing EMEA at Overland Storage said: “Overland is bringing to market game-changing storage solutions like the SnapServer SAN S2000 that address the management, performance and scalability shortcomings of tradition storage solutions. This award acknowledges our execution in delivering market-leading storage solutions to our channel partners.”

The SnapServer SAN S2000 is a 2U iSCSI SAN appliance designed specifically for businesses with growing storage needs and limited resources to manage an end-to-end storage strategy. It features active-active mirroring and failover, snapshots, replication, automated capacity expansion, centralised management and support for Microsoft Cluster Server. With automated capacity expansion, policy-based storage volume expansion can be easily deployed in a just-in-time manner without IT intervention, eliminating guesswork and over-provisioning.

The S2000 scales effortlessly to 192TB to support storage growth requirements over time. With simplified and integrated user interfaces, the SnapServer SAN S2000 is a cost-effective solution for businesses with virtual server environments or storage consolidation requirements.

Overland Storage’s New iSCSI San Solution Delivers Effortless Data Management and Data Protection

Overland Storage, which operates in the same industry as companies like Quantum Corporation and Hewlett Packard, Inc., noted that its SnapServer SAN S2000 expands Overland’s market reach across the data lifecycle.

Overland Storage, the trusted global provider of effortless data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle, today announced the new Overland SnapServer SAN S2000: a feature rich, resource-efficient iSCSI SAN platform for businesses with growing data. The SnapServer SAN S2000 enables companies with Windows, VMware, Hyper-V, UNIX, Linux, or Mac OS X to take advantage of SAN capabilities that have traditionally been considered too complex to manage without specialized expertise, including active-active mirroring and failover, snapshots, replication and Microsoft Cluster Server support. Featuring automated capacity expansion, the solution enables policy-based storage volume growth to occur in a just-in-time manner without IT intervention, eliminating guesswork and over-provisioning. The SnapServer SAN S2000 scales effortlessly to 120TB and is a cost effective solution for businesses with virtualized server environments or storage consolidation requirements.

Optimized for Use in Virtualized Server Environments

• VMware –The SnapServer SAN S2000 integrates directly into the VMware management application to provide a host of advantages that include: simplified data store creation wizards for provisioning targets, the ability to provision storage for ESX clusters within VMware utilizing customized SnapServer tools, single interface configuration for SnapServer targets and VMware high availability for ESX data stores using native VMware utilities (DRS, HA, VMotion) with the SnapServer SAN active-active failover
  option.


• Microsoft Hyper-V –The SnapServer SAN S2000 is certified to support Windows Hyper-V Server for Microsoft virtualization deployments. With customized tools developed for the SnapServer SAN it enables simplified management of Hyper-V for backup utilizing VSS (volume shadow copy services), replication and mirroring. In addition the SnapServer SAN supports direct pass through access for guest virtual machines enabling higher performance and security.

Simple Management and Deployment

“The new SnapServer SAN S2000 has allowed us to provide networked block-based storage to multiple servers and easily manage our data growth from a single interface,” said Darren Dong, director of communications and web development at Riverside Community College District, an early beta tester of the SnapServer SAN S2000. “Our Fibre Channel SAN was making it difficult and expensive to map across multiple systems. The SnapServer SAN S2000 allows us to easily manage existing connections and create new ones as needed. We now spend a fraction of the time setting up and monitoring our storage solutions due to the ease of use of the S2000 and SnapServer Manager.”

Effortless Data Management and Data Protection, Wherever Data is Located

The SnapServer SAN S2000 is the first iSCSI SAN solution to fully integrate autoprovisioning, an automated capacity expansion feature. With this feature, storage volumes are automatically expanded based on predefined policy – without requiring intervention. Disk usage is also tracked, giving IT administrators the ability to easily monitor and manage disk capacity consumption across the organization. Companies with standalone or clustered Windows servers running business critical applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, can utilize the SnapServer SAN solution’s active-active failover capabilities to ensure high availability and maximum uptime. Advanced replication functionality that supports up to 256 snapshots and failover ensure data is protected and accessible at all times – regardless of its location – while accelerating backup efficiency.

“Businesses large and small face similar data storage growth challenges – but often without the resources or expertise to effectively deploy a SAN. They need a solution that can be easily deployed, is simple to manage and can accommodate growing amounts of data,” said Benjamin S. Woo, program vice president of enterprise storage systems at IDC. “Especially as more companies deploy virtualized environments, it becomes even more complex to manage data
growth over the long term. With autoprovisioning technology like that in Overland SnapServer SAN S2000, companies can ensure that their storage solution can support business growth without having to pre-determine storage requirements or running the risk of over-provisioning.”

Features and Benefits

• Automated capacity expansion – The SnapServer SAN S2000 easily manages storage growth with an autoprovisioning feature that tracks disk usage and automatically extends volumes that reach pre-defined thresholds, without requiring IT intervention.


• Simple storage management – With SnapServer Manager, IT managers can easily monitor and manage all SnapServer SAN and NAS systems remotely or locally via a Windows-based application or via web browser in heterogeneous environments.


• Maximized application uptime – SnapServer SAN S2000 ensures that essential applications are available at all times by supporting active-active mirroring and failover, and is fully compatible with the Windows Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) framework; also supports Microsoft Cluster Server.


• Disaster recovery – The inclusion of a VSS provider (Volume Shadow Copy Services)supports business continuity in the event of a disaster and increases backup efficiency while ensuring application consistency during backup and replication. It also enables SnapServer SAN S2000 to handle up to hundreds of thousands of replication recovery points.


• Twelve drives expandable to 120TB – The SnapServer SAN S2000 is a 2U base system that can seamlessly be expanded up to 120TB utilizing SnapServer E2000 expansion units.

“The SnapServer line has always been known for delivering rock-solid, reliable products for IT departments that need effortless and cost-effective storage solutions.

The SnapServer SAN S2000 not only builds on this reputation, but actually brings a new level of innovation and sophistication to the product line,” said Eric Kelly, president and CEO, Overland Storage. “We remain completely focused on listening to and addressing the specific storage needs of businesses by offering storage solutions that can quickly and easily be deployed within existing environments for instant scalability and reliability. Overland strives to deliver storage solutions that are truly effortless for businesses of any size.”

Overland Storage Inc.: Eric Kelly, President and CEO

Eric Kelly has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Overland Storage, Inc., since January 2009, and as a board member since 2007. His most recent corporate position was Vice President and General Manager of storage systems solutions at Adaptec, Inc. Prior to that, he served as President and CEO of Snap Appliance, which was acquired by Adaptec. Two years earlier, Mr. Kelly engineered the purchase of Snap from Quantum Corp., having recognized the inherent value in Snap, where the main product he drove became the volume market leader in network-attached storage (NAS) appliances. Mr. Kelly earned an MBA from San Francisco State University and a B.S. in business from San Jose State University.

Please give us a brief history and background of Overland Storage.

Mr. Kelly: It's our 29th year of business. Overland (OVRL) originally started off as a tape company, and the business was really designed around providing products to a major OEM, which was HP. At one point, HP represented about 65% to 70% of Overland's business. The other piece of Overland's business was a very fast-growing and well-supported distribution channel around the world. And with those two pieces of the business, it grew very well. Our fiscal year 2009 ended in June, and we reported a little over $105 million in revenue. We have over 1,000 partners worldwide.

We support and sell solutions in more than 60 different countries and have over 300,000 units installed around the world - over 100,000 units across tape-based products and over 200,000 across our disk-based product lines. Through an acquisition that we made back in June of 2008 - we acquired a company by the name of Snap Appliance that was part of Adaptec - we now have two very strong brands, the Overland brand and the Snap Appliance brand.

In the 29 years Overland has been in business, technology has changed drastically. Talk a bit more about what your business strategy is today and going forward.

Mr. Kelly: Our strategy today is to provide effortless data protection and data management solutions end-to-end, from online to nearline to archival, all the way to the cloud. We're doing that through a seamless management layer that is very simple to use, very easy to install, and it stems from the ease of use that Snap Appliance delivered to its customers for many years. I'll use the example of whether you have an iPhone or an iPod, or now the iPad, you have a very seamless, very easy to use, very intuitive interface. In the storage arena, ease of use is a very strong requirement that we hear from both our customers and our partners. For example, the product that we announced a couple of weeks ago, our iSCSI SAN product, SnapServer SAN, uses the same effortless management interface that we have on our SnapServer NAS products.

Tell us more about your main product lines and particularly the latest technological advances you've made.

Mr. Kelly: We have a network-attached storage product line, SnapServer NAS. The intelligence behind that is GuardianOS, which is our network-attached storage operating system. There are very few of those out in the industry that have been around as long as we have; we were probably one of the original network-attached operating systems. You now have NetApp, you have Microsoft and their storage server product line, and then you have EMC and maybe a few others that have enterprise-class operating systems in that arena.

With the product that we just announced, SnapServer SAN, we feel we're changing the playing field in terms of delivering enterprise solutions to the mid-tier customer base at a different price point and value proposition. We offer required enterprise features, such as snapshots, replication, support for VMware, and we also have what people have come to know as thin provisioning - we call it "auto-provisioning," but it's a similar architecture. We're able to deliver all of that at a sub-$15,000 price point.

You mentioned having 300,000 units around the world. Talk about your customer base. Is there a typical Overland Storage customer? And what's the range of your customer base in terms of the company and industry size? Are they in the U.S. versus overseas?

Mr. Kelly: We have a two-tiered, go-to-market strategy. We work 100% through our reseller partners, our value-added resellers. In terms of the geographic makeup, about 60% of our revenue is in the U.S., 40% is outside of the U.S. And of that 40%, probably 90% of that is in the European region. We have a pretty broad customer footprint geographically. We're not tied to any one vertical, so whether it's oil and gas, utility, technology, education, government, retail, health care or the financial market space, we have a fairly even distribution of customers. It allows us to not have ups and downs just because one vertical happens to be stronger in one quarter than another. It also gives us a good distribution in terms of geographic presence. As for the typical customer, we have several types. One is the distributed enterprise.

Geoff Barrall CTO of Overland Storage -SnapServer

Former BlueArc and Data Robotics founder

Overland Storage, Inc. introduced the appointment of Dr. Geoff Barrall as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Vice President of Engineering.

Reporting to Eric Kelly, Overland Storage president and CEO, Barrall is responsible for Overland product development, engineering, and research and development functions. Dr. Barrall brings over 20 years of experience in the design, development and delivery of data storage solutions, as well as extensive operational experience and deep business insight.

"We are delighted to welcome Geoff to the Overland Storage executive team. He is a recognized visionary in the storage industry and brings a proven track record of success," said Kelly. "Geoff's passion for innovation and technical leadership will be invaluable as we evolve and execute our product strategy."

Prior to joining Overland Storage, Barrall served as CEO of Data Robotics, a company he founded in 2005. With more than a dozen storage-related patents to his credit, he has founded five companies, including BlueArc Corporation and several IT and consulting services firms. He currently serves on the board of directors of Nexsan and previously served on the board of directors for Tacit Networks and the advisory boards for both Data Domain and NeoPath.

Dr. Barrall earned his PhD in Cybernetics from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

"I am very excited to be a part of the team that is cultivating a renewed spirit of innovation and leadership at Overland Storage. This is a company with significant brand equity and potential for continued growth," said Barrall. "I look forward to leading the technology team that will enable Overland to expand the solution portfolio in unique and powerful ways."

SnapServer SAN S2000 - Now everyone can have a SAN

Now everyone can have a SAN. Businesses with growing storage needs and limited resources for storage management need a networked storage solution that streamlines data management operations and increases information infrastructure performance without additional training, resources and costs. The SnapServer SAN S2000 scales to 120 TB, effortlessly expands volumes without requiring IT intervention and enables companies to leverage SAN capabilities that have traditionally been considered too complex to manage without specialized expertise. Optimized for virtualized server enviroments, SnapServer SAN S2000 includes support for Microsoft Windows Cluster Server, active-active failover, snapshots, and automatic capacity expansion.

Overview

The SnapServer SAN S2000 is a 2U iSCSI SAN appliance designed specifically for businesses with growing storage needs and limited resources to manage an end-to-end storage strategy. Built on the Overland Storage vision of “effortless data,” the SnapServer S2000 offers an intuitive, simplified management console and Windows-based guided wizards to make installation and maintenance simple for any level of administrator. In addition, the SnapServer has an ideal mix of standard enterprise features including auto provisioning, mirroring for high availability, replication and snapshots for data protection. The SnapServer S2000 simultaneously lowers ongoing operational expenditures and significantly lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) without compromising on the features a business needs to succeed.

Management for the Non-Storage Expert

Building on its vision of “effortless data,” Overland Storage has put the storage expertise into the SnapServer S2000, making it intuitive and easy to manage - virtually eliminating the need for technical experience with iSCSI or SAN systems. With a plug and play architecture combined with a simplified management console and built-in Windows-based wizards, the SnapServer S2000 dramatically saves time on installation, setup, and the vast majority of multi-step storage and data protection tasks.

Breakthrough Automation for SAN Storage Provisioning
The SnapServer SAN S2000 enables companies to leverage Overland’s unique Auto Provisioning capability. Administrators can meet increasing data growth requirements by automatically increasing capacity on the host as needed –without user involvement. Most SAN storage systems require storage volumes to be expanded manually. SnapServer SAN S2000 Auto Provisioning makes capacity expansion “self-managing” by proactively growing volume capacity without any pre-allocation or administrator involvement. Special monitoring software runs in the background to track disk usage and extend volumes that reach pre-defined thresholds. IT administrators no longer have to calculate future storage needs before knowing them.

Overcoming Management Complexity

The SnapServer Manager provides a consistent interface across all products. From a single console, IT administrators can monitor and manage one or more SnapServer SAN or NAS storage systems that are located anywhere on the system – across the globe or down the hall. Utilizing a local windows application or web browser in heterogeneous environments, the console manages storage event logs and immediately displays any faults. Email notifications or text events are automatically sent to the administrators. As an “OS agnostic” appliance, the SnapServer SAN can easily be deployed to provide iSCSI storage to systems running Windows, VMware, Linux, Mac OS X and Novell Netware.

Eliminating Data Protection Pitfalls

Business continuity plans will keep an organization up and running in the event of a major disaster or technology failure. A key to this success is a feature rich solution that provides both mirroring and replication. With the SnapServer SAN, companies don’t have to make the choice between the features they need and the price they can afford. The SnapServer SAN ensures that essential applications remain available at all times by supporting multiple servers reading or writing SAN volumes simultaneously across multiple Ethernet ports. It is fully compatible with the Windows Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) framework, supports Microsoft Cluster Server, complies with Microsoft’s ‘Simple SAN’ program, and other third-party management applications. In addition, the SnapServer SAN mirroring option provides real-time high availability protection for business critical data and is fully integrated with Windows Server Platforms and VMware. With the SnapServer SAN replication option, companies have an easy-to-use yet, powerful solution to a broad range of backup and recovery scenarios. Fully integrated with Microsoft Volume ShadowCopy Services (VSS) for application consistent replication and disaster recovery for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server, the replication option supports 256 snapshots and scheduled and periodic updates of replicated data. Unlike conventional snapshots, which typically allow a maximum of a few hundred recovery points, SnapServer SAN replicas are designed to handle up to hundreds of thousands of recovery points.

Making Interoperability a Non-Issue

Compatibility is the last thing a storage administrator wants to worry about when implementing SAN storage. That’s why the SnapServer SAN S2000 supports out-of-the-box iSCSI interoperability with Windows, Windows Clusters, Windows VSS, VMware (ESX and vSphere) certification, Linux, Mac OS X, and Novell NetWare. Direct integration with VMware vCenter makes the SnapServer SAN one of the easiest management tools on the market today. The SnapServer SAN S2000 provides for multiple servers reading or writing SAN volumes simultaneously across multiple Ethernet ports. In addition, the SnapServer SAN S2000 is also fully qualified with Windows Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) framework as well as in full compliance with Microsoft’s ‘Simple SAN’ program, and includes a VDS (Virtual Disk Services) provider for integration with the Microsoft SAN Manager and other third-party management applications.

Value Delivered

Overland Storage has always focused on providing high value storage. Unlike other iSCSI SAN solutions, the SnapServer S2000 is built on industry standard high performance hardware. Using the latest in CPU power and RAM, the SnapServer SAN appliance provides higher end performance and features while maintaining a low TCO to make it the best value in the market.