Overland With 2,000 NAS and Tape Deployments

Overland Storage, Inc. has expanded its product deployment footprint in the higher education market with over two thousand college, university and vocational school deployments across the globe.

By utilizing Overland’s SnapServer line of network-attached storage and NEO Series tape solutions, educational institutions simplified data management operations and addressing growing storage needs.

"Educational institutions face unique technology challenges in the 21st century," said Jillian Mansolf, Vice President Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Overland Storage. "Working with tight budgets, ballooning enrollments and increasingly technology-dependent programs, colleges and universities require flexible and cost-effective solutions to store and manage data throughout the data lifecycle. Overland Storage has both disk and tape solutions that enable higher education institutions to effortlessly store and protect data while saving on both hardware acquisition and ongoing management expenditures."

University of San Diego, San Diego, California
The University of San Diego has been utilizing the NEO 8000 to back up financial, human resources and IT data from 115 machines across multiple environments to 320 LTO-4 tapes NEO 8000‘s intelligent and proactive remote management capability has allowed the University to reduce operational costs while improving data availability

"Like all Overland Storage products I have managed over the past nine years the NEO 8000 is extremely reliable, reaffirming my belief that Overland delivers on its effortless data management promise," said Thomas Kolbe, Systems Architect, University of San Diego. "NEO 8000 is the most affordable solution for us to back up terabytes of data of different types from across departments while maintaining data availability and protection. In addition we’ve received excellent service and support from the Overland Storage technical team."

Neumont University, South Jordan, Utah
Neumont University is utilizing the SnapServer N2000 and NEO 200S LTO-5 to back up 1.5 TB of student, staff and faculty data from over 400 users located throughout the campus. Utilizing the SnapServer N2000 and NEO 200S has allowed the university to streamline backup operations while maintaining dual site backups (disk target to tape target), cutting their backup time in half and decreasing overhead costs

"In the past we were forced to do backups twice – both to tape, which took an incredible amount of time. In researching possible solutions I found that Overland offered both a tape and disk storage solution that would enable us to create a disk to disk to tape backup without adding additional layers of complexity or administrative time," said Matt Jorgenson, systems administrator at Neumont University. "The SnapServer solution was as easy to set up as it is to manage and it gave us what we needed in terms of connection technologies, including iSCSI and NFS. With the combination of Overland disk and tape solutions we have been able to reduce our backup time by half."

The Knowledge Media Institute, Open University,
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
The Knowledge Media Institute is currently using a NEO 2000e tape library to backup 48TB of research data from more than 100 researchers, support staff and students undertaking research as well as supporting semantic web and knowledge services. The Overland Storage solution allowed The Institute the ability to cost effectively safeguard the terabytes of research generated that must be backed up and protected for at least one month

"We started working with Overland over ten years ago, using their NEO 2000e tape library as the foundation of our backup strategy," said Paul Alexander, IT manager, The Knowledge Media Institute, Open University. "Overland’s tape solution addresses our needs perfectly – it’s rock solid and reliable, which provides me with complete peace of mind. In fact, we have just bought another library to support our continuing growth."

Challenges for Educational Institutions
From transcripts to departmental storage to research data, higher education institutions face accelerating data storage requirements while grappling with limited IT resources for storage management. A number of factors compound growth and complexity:

• Distributed architectures: As SAN and NAS systems scale to support multiple networks across campus locations or geographies, a storage complexity problem can grow in parallel
• Online curricula: The 24x7x365 infrastructure requirements of web-based education add a non-trivial level of complexity
• Heterogeneous environments: A blend of new and legacy applications and databases often creates non-efficient long-term data stores that grow with lower utilization rates
• Network abuse: A percentage of network traffic is misused for downloading of content, leading to degradation in data transfer rates and wasted storage capacities
• Long-term archiving: For both research and administration purposes, many institutions have seen a marked increase in their archiving requirements