Even if it's just for sentimental reasons I hope Eric and his team can turn Overland and Snap around. After all there was a time when NAS brought NetApp and Snap to mind.
Tandberg Data recently made the brilliant move of buying Exabyte, just as disk-to-disk backup became the new conventional wisdom, leaving them supporting four-tape format families, two of which, SLR and VXA, were proprietary. They were batting .500 in their first two attempts to move into the disk market, scoring a single with the RDX removable cartridges and a strike on the DPS1000 iSCSI VTL. I just don't see the need for a VTL in the SMB market where there's only one media server and you can use NAS or even DAS with acceptable performance at half the cost and complexity.
Their latest product the DPS2000 NAS is a 4-bay, Linux-based unit with an Atom processor that Tandberg is packaging in both rack-mount and desktop cases for secondary storage applications like back-up and video surveillance. It has features like remote replication and the ability to grow capacity without losing data by swapping out a drive for a bigger one, and then waiting for the rebuild to complete before swapping out the next. The low-end NAS market is very competitive with Buffalo, SnapServer, EMC's Iomega, NetGear and an apparent cast of thousands pushing their systems to SMBs.
To stand out in that crowd Tandberg's bundled AccuGard backup software for Windows, an OEM version of Data Storage Group's DS Shield Professional that has built-in data deduplication. They're also bundling AccuGard with their RDX kit, which could be a great solution for SMBs. A 640GB RDX cartridge with dedupe should hold all a typical SMB's data, and is a much better solution to removable back-up than any low-end tape drive like DAT 160.
Finally SGI (actually Rackable), who bought SGI last year and adopted the moniker, snapped up Copan's assets for $2 million. MAID will live on but the limits of Copan's revolution -- mostly that its power supplies could only spin up a quarter of its drives at a time along with other vendors implementing spin down -- left Copan without a competitive advantage.
