Jefferson Homebuilders Customer of Sphere 3D

Sphere 3D Corporation, formerly Overland, announced that Jefferson Home Builders, Inc., a Culpeper, VA-based builder and land developer of quality homes serving homeowners for over 40 years, has selected the NEOs T24 top automated tape library to backup and archive key customer project plans and infrastructure data.

Jefferson Homebuilders needed a powerful, yet easy to use backup and archive solution to protect their critical business data pertaining to customer and regulatory data, project plans, schedules and logistics, financing, and business infrastructure. The NEOs T24 solution provided Jefferson Homebuilders with up to 150TB of storage capacity in a compact 2U form factor plus the features and efficiencies needed for archive and DR.

Seth Feaganes, network engineer, Jefferson Homebuilders, said: “I’m happy to say that the upgrade to the NEOs T24 has reduced my duplication to tape window three hold. One of the critical jobs that runs nightly typically took 45 minutes just to duplicate to tape on the old system, but finished in only 11 minutes on the new NEOs.The new system averages 10,000/MB/minute compared to our old tape library that averaged about 3,000/MB per minute. I went from a total tape capacity of 6.4TB on the Dell to 25TB on the Overland uncompressed. Finally, I have reduced the number of tapes I have to take offsite per week from 4 tapes to only 1 now. This project was a complete success as I have accomplished all of my goals. I am very happy thus far with this upgrade, and I finally have some piece of mind with our backups.”

Designed for SMBs or remote locations of a distributed enterprise, the NEOs T24 delivers capabilities including remote management, removable cartridge magazines, and upgradable tape drives, all in a compact form factor. Available as either a 12-slot autoloader or a 24-slot library, the NEOs T24 provides backup and archive capability for a variety of data center environments. Moving data to a NEO S-Series library reduces backup storage requirements, reduces costs, improves use of valuable floor space, improves energy efficiency, provides a higher level of data security and improves performance of networks and disk-based backup systems.

According to Santa Clara Consulting Group, between 2003 and 2013, more than 45EBs of tape storage have been shipped, with growth every year in the amount of data stored on tape. This trend is expected to continue due to the performance, capacity, reliability and cost effectiveness delivered by tape storage solutions.

Sphere 3D offers a portfolio of tape automation products spanning from an entry-level StorageLoader to the new NEO XL-Series of tape libraries that are for larger businesses with changing IT environments and data growth. The NEO XL-Series starts with 90TB of storage capacity, and provides the ability to increase that storage capacity up to 3.5PB by adding additional NEO XL-Series modules.