Analysis

posted on 01 April 2008 12:39

Bob Farkaly is the world-wide sales VP for Overland Storage. His career to date most definitely does not show a definite trajectory in that direction. It begins lke this ...

Once upon a time Bob and John Mates both worked at StoneFly, which describes itself as the original innovator of iSCSI storage. A new CEO joined the company around the 2000/2001 time and John Mates, not liking the new regime, quit. A few weeks later Bob left too and he and John Mates started up Okapi Software to build an iSCSI storage product, a backup appliance.

D2D2T
Diamond Lauffin was at Nexsan when Nexsan coined the term disk-to-disk (D2D) backup. So Bob (pictured) went one better and came up with D2D2T, disk-to-disk-to-tape, with the idea of a disk backup target, a virtual tape library VTL), being an intermediate stop on data's way to the safety vault that is tape. The Okapi software product was ipXcelerator and the hope was that by marketing it as an iSCSI D2D2T product it would attract a tape company.

Sure enough it did, and Overland Storage, then run by Chris Calisi, came calling and liked what it saw. A fast couple of months later and Okapi Software was bought for $5 million by Overland. The ipXcelerator product name was changed to REO - it sounded as if it was related to Overland's NEO tape libraries - and its colour was altered but the same chassis manufacturer was used and the product was pretty much the same.

Market leader
Fast forward to 2008 and some 6,000 units have been sold. Contrary to EMC claims, Bob Farkaldy reckons Overland is the installed base VTL leader. EMC may have shipped more boxes labelled as VTLs in some way but that doesn't mean customers are using them as VTLs, whereas nobody buys a REO to do anything but VTL work. A Clariion is a general purpose array.

The software inside REO has been enhanced with lots of refinements but it is still essentially the same concept, and as strongly relevant today as the number one backup problem is still backup speed and the number two problem is restore speed.

Asked, somewhat teasingly, if VTL is now a mature technology Bob Farkaly, stiffens and then explains how VTL technology is exactly not mature. In fact it is the base for a whole lot of new and exciting storage technology.

VTL as a delivery platform
A VTL now is, as well as being a VTL, a delivery platform for next-generation applications such as de-duplication, data transport using something like replication, and disaster recovery.

Farkaly says de-dupe is very good for backup data as it cuts down disk space needs. It's also very good for sending data across slow wide area network (WAN) links. Overland is developing its own data de-duplication and data transport product. The code will be complete in the next few weeks.

REO currently ships with Diligent's de-duplication software and, for Overland, Diligent has been an exceptional de-dupe partner. However, all good things come to an end and Overland wants to add its own de-dupe to REO, but with a twist, with a hardware implementation.

Hardware de-dupe
Recently a firm called Hifn introduced the first hardware de-duplication product. Coincidentally John Mates, Farkaly's partner in Okapi Software, is now at Hifn. What goes around comes around.

Farkaly says that you could think of pairing a drive array with a hardware de-dupe engine and then putting a network-attached storage (NAS) head on it, which is roughly what Data Domain does. But you could also put different 'heads' or personalities on this array/de-dupe hardware foundation.

It could be presented as block storage, either iSCSI or Fibre Channel, with the same block-level de-dupe working on the block storage data in the same way as it works on file storage blocks. The HW de-dupe engine becomes an adjunct to the drive array controller; it is lke adding conservation technology as much less disk capacity is needed.

Overland's Ultamus protected nearline storage product is based on Xyratex drive arrays. What we could consider is a 1 or 2U head added to a Xyratex array to produce a de-duping-in-hardware array, also a data-moving array for edge-to-core backup and disaster recovery.

De-dupe progression
Farkaly says de-duplication and data transport are technologies that he sees growing organically in Overland. In the past Overland built tape libraries for HP and others to their design. Now it is adding more of its own IP to its products, and adding more value to the company as a result.

Xyratex isn't adding de-dupe functionality to its arrays. Blu-Arc, OnStor, NetApp and Data Direct all use Xyratex arrays and they could add their own de-dupe functionality to them too. In fact NetApp already does.

If this migration of de-dupe into silicon, to gain speed and free up server CPU cycles, becomes general then the future for SW-only de-dupe products like FalconStor's becomes bleak. If de-dupe becomes a feature of storage then it will no longer get sold on its own. (Data Domain already knows this as our Frank Slootman interview demonstrated. Data Domain sells storage, not de-duplication.) 

Now another topic with great relevance here is solid state disk (SSD) technology, and Farkaly gets quite excited about the idea of holding the de-duplication dictionary or map in SSD for much faster access.

Happy ever after
Where does this leave us? It's entirely possible that Overland Storage will introduce a hardware de-duping and data moving storage array sometime this year. The use of SSD might happen in this timeframe or possibly later. Of course, nobody is committing to anything.

The result could be that REO becomes the first hardware de-duping VTL with data transport capabilities.

So ... once upon a time two guys left StoneFly and started an iSCSI VTL company. They sold it to Overland for five million dollars and then went their separate ways. Now they are coming together again, in the sense that Overland and Hifn are discussing things, ... and they both lived happily ever after. The end.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}