Market Leader in Cost-Effective, Flexible Backup and Recovery With Nearly 4,000 Units Shipped Worldwide Supplies More Than 20 Petabytes of Storage for SMB Customers

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today announced the results of a new study by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) that verifies the industry-leading capabilities of Overland's REO SERIES VTL disk-based backup and recovery appliance. ESG's Lab Validation Report cited numerous REO benefits, including ease of installation and operation, configuration flexibility, valued-added features, substantially improved backup and recovery performance, investment protection as well as lowered administrative overhead.

According to ESG research, more than 80 percent of medium-sized companies surveyed are interested in some form of disk-to-disk (D2D) backup. Their No. 1 priority is improving backup performance while recovery reigns as one of the biggest benefits. The challenge for many small to medium-sized organizations, however, is backing up mission-critical data in a 24-hour period. During lab testing, it took ESG researchers two and a half hours to back up 100 GB of data to tape, compared with five minutes using an Overland REO 9000 with Fibre Channel connectivity and 10 minutes using the REO 9000 with iSCSI connectivity. Additionally, restoring a single file from a REO 9000 virtual tape was instantaneous while recovering from virtual tape over iSCSI was more than 200 times faster than physical tape.

As part of ESG's hands-on analysis of the REO 9000, analysts Tony Asaro, Brian Garrett and Tony Palmer performed various tasks to obtain the following findings:

• Simplified installation enables customers of any technical level to use REO;
• REO can be configured easily as a virtual tape library (VTL), a set of standalone tape drives or disk volumes (LUNs);
• VTL support decreases backup times by running many backups in parallel using existing backup policies;
• REO 9000 iSCSI backup to virtual tape is twice as fast as backup to physical tape;
• Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) is a valuable feature that enables greater capacity utilization while simplifying management; and
• Using backup software to backup data to the REO 9000 and then move it to physical tape was very easy and worked seamlessly without policy changes.

"While the majority of storage vendors have focused on the high-end of the D2D backup market, Overland has done an excellent job of providing specialized solutions targeting small to mid-sized customers, departments within large organizations and remote offices," said Tony Palmer, ESG lab engineer, "The REO SERIES appliances are easy to use and provide excellent performance for both backup and recovery of data. In fact, our lab testing showed that using the REO 9000 can be hundreds of times faster than recovering from tape."

A wide range of customer implementations showcase the many performance benefits of Overland's REO 9000, along with reinforcing the advantages of seamless disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) data protection, including:

• SkyWest: Largest regional airline reduces backup time and administration by more than 80 percent using REO 9000/NEO tape library D2D2T solution;
• Kaufman and Canoles: Top-five law firm in Virginia relies on REO 9000 VTL to backup replicated remote data, then archives all backups on a NEO tape library, saving thousands of dollars by eliminating remote tape drives;
• Seiz Printing: Tech-savvy printer takes advantage of REO 9000's flexible architecture to configure appliance as both VTLs for backups and disk volumes for secondary storage as needed; and
• University of Wisconsin Credit Union: Full-service credit union with more than 100,000 members uses REO 9000 to slash backup time by nearly 75 percent while cutting restore time from two-plus hours to one minute or less.

"The latest ESG lab report confirms that the highly versatile, easy-to-use REO SERIES VTL disk-based backup and recovery appliance is ideally suited for mid-range data protection," said Michael Kerman, vice president and chief strategy officer of Overland Storage. "As a result, REO continues to dominate as the market leader in D2D backup with our number of customers continuing to grow rapidly worldwide."

Each REO SERIES appliance can be configured as a VTL with up to 32 virtual tape drives, 180 virtual cartridges and four library partitions. Additionally, the flexible device can be configured with up to 64 virtual storage devices, which can comprise any mix of virtual tape drives and/or disk volumes.

About Overland Storage

Now in its 26th year, Overland Storage is a market leader and innovative provider of simply protected storage solutions -- smart data protection appliances and software modules designed to work together, affordably, to ensure that information is automatically safe, readily available and always there. Overland's award-winning data protection solutions include the ULTAMUS SERIES(TM) of protected primary storage appliances; the REO SERIES(R) of disk-based backup, recovery appliances and VTL; and the NEO SERIES(R) and ARCvault(TM) tape automation solutions. Overland sells its products through leading OEMs, commercial distributors, storage integrators and value-added resellers. For more information, visit Overland's web site at www.overlandstorage.com.

Except for the factual statements made herein, the information contained in this news release consists of forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Words and expressions reflecting optimism and satisfaction with current prospects, as well as words such as "believe," "intends," "estimates," expects," "projects," plans," "anticipates" and variations thereof, identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean that a statement is not forward looking. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and the company's actual results could differ materially from those contained in such statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include risks and uncertainties associated with the company's acquisition of Zetta Systems, Inc., including possible integration difficulties and successful execution of the business plan related to the acquisition; possible delays in new product introductions and shipments by the company including the new ULTAMUS and ARCvault lines, including versions subject to the company's new OEM contracts; possible delays in enhancements to the company's REO line; market acceptance of the company's new product offerings; the timing and market acceptance of new product introductions by competitors; the speed at which HP transitions from the products it currently buys from the company to its next-generation products to be purchased from another vendor; delays, unbudgeted expenses, inefficiencies and production problems that may result from the transition of manufacturing to Sanmina-SCI; worldwide information technology spending levels; unexpected shortages of critical components; rescheduling or cancellation of customer orders; loss of a major customer; the timing and amount of licensing royalties; general competition and price pressures in the marketplace; the company's ability to control costs and expenses; and general economic conditions. Reference is also made to other factors set forth in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the "Risk Factors," "Management's Discussion and Analysis" and other sections of the company's Form 10-K currently on file with the SEC. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this release and the company undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events or circumstances after the date of this release.

Overland, Overland Storage, ARCvault SERIES, ULTAMUS SERIES, REO SERIES, NEO SERIES and PROTECTION OS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Overland Storage, Inc.

SOURCE Overland Storage, Inc. 12/06/2006


CONTACT: Sue Hetzel of HetzelMeade Communications, +1-760-434-9927,
sue@hetzelmeade.com, for Overland Storage, Inc.
Web site: http://www.overlandstorage.com
(OVRL)


0924 12/06/2006 07:30 EST http://www.prnewswire.com