Overberg?
When I worked within the UK I always liked the Overland Storage tape (Neo) and Disk (Reo) appliances
We were quite successful with these products within FE and HE as well as councils
Overland also tried to punt themselves as a storage vendor too, with their Colossus range which was nothing more than an Infortrend array with an HP server based NAS head on it and a nice Overland rebadge
Buying the native Infortrend product was a much cheaper option and combining it with a (then available) OnStor (say LSi) NAS gateway gave much better bang for buck than Colossus ever could.
It seems as if Overland learned from their experiences and managed to morph themselves within the ever changing storage and backup arena. Sadly almost everything Overland produced was available from other vendors like Quantum, Dell, HP and IBM to name a few.
Although Overland weren't overly profitable they did remain committed to the channel within the UK and advocated their products with an excellent sales and pre-sales team combined with decent (third party provided) technical support. The fact we could stretch warranties to five years was a good selling point too.
The Tandberg backup range, especially the RDX competed on the lower end of the backup, but one thing that was missing was a multi-bay RDX backup unit. The RDX was always a "single drive affair" but it was and still remains a damned good one at that.
Perhaps Overland's 'acquisition come merger' with Tandberg will open the sluice gates to products offering the best of both worlds?
I certainly hope so, this could be the golden egg that Overland needs to become profitable and hammer out a new generation of products that doesn't mirror what other vendors already have.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
