Overland Storage, Inc. announced that J.F. Shea Co. Inc., one of the oldest and most prominent companies in the construction industry, has standardized on REO SERIES disk-based virtual tape libraries (VTLs), as well as NEO SERIES and ARCvault tape libraries to deliver heightened data protection tailored specifically to the capacity and performance needs of its corporate data center as well as large divisional and smaller, local offices.

Headquartered in Walnut, Calif., J.F. Shea has diversified and grown significantly since its founding in 1881. Major milestones include the company's work on the foundation of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system as well as its contribution to the construction of Hoover Dam. Today, J.F. Shea is perhaps best known for top-notch, quality home building through its Shea Homes division, which currently is the largest corporate segment, with eight divisions in six states.

Several years ago, J.F. Shea migrated many of its mission-critical file servers to a secondary data center at a co-location facility for enhanced security and improved business continuity. The move also led to an opportunity to streamline arduous tape-based backup and recovery operations, which had begun impacting network performance and creating a management burden. J.F. Shea sought a disk-based solution to accelerate backups as well as automate remote backups and restores to reduce frequent trips to the co-lo for tape rotation and management. Additionally, the company wanted to store three-to-five daily full backups on disk to meet its recovery point objective and recovery time objective (RTO/RPO).

With help from Synegi, an Irvine, Calif.-based integrator specializing in the design and implementation of high-performance data protection solutions, J.F. Shea evaluated a variety of disk-based VTLs and expandable tape libraries before deciding that Overland had the broadest disk- and tape-based product portfolio, offering a complete range of data protection choices to accommodate a variety of backup, recovery and long-term data retention requirements across its data center, co-lo and regional sites.

J.F. Shea initially installed a REO 9000 and NEO 4000 for disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) data protection at its co-lo site and then added a REO 4000 and NEO 2000 at its data center. About a year later, REO 4000-NEO 2000 pairs were deployed at the data center and a large division in Arizona. Next, Overland's entry-level REO 1500 and ARCvault 12 tape autoloader were deployed at two smaller divisional offices as part of a company-wide rollout. Plans are underway to deploy additional REO-NE0 or REO-ARCvault pairs at remaining sites.

"There's nothing better than being able to tailor a technology solution with the proper fit for your backup-and-recovery needs instead of being forced into a one-size-fits-all approach," says Ray Hayes CTO of J.F. Shea & Co. "Overland's broad and diversified product line of disk- and tape-based appliances lets us mix and match REO, NEO and ARCvault products based on the amount and value of data in question while also taking into account different RPOs and RTOs for elevated business continuity."

Aside from reducing full backups from 10 to three hours, J.F. Shea keeps several days of backups on disk so restores of recently backed up data now can be accomplished in minutes instead of hours or days. Moreover, administrative overhead has been lowered by 50 percent.

According to Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of worldwide marketing for Overland Storage, the company remains focused on providing a wide assortment of flexible disk and tape product choices. "Not all data is created equal so it's critically important to offer a plethora of best-in-class products that can meet today's business requirements while scaling sufficiently to keep pace with future growth," he says. "Our D2D2T family of expandable disk and tape appliances delivers unprecedented levels of data protection along with superior configuration flexibility."