SAN DIEGO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 4, 2014) - Overland Storage®, Inc. (NASDAQ: OVRL), a trusted global provider of unified data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle, today announced the availability of RAINcloud OS 4.1, its newest enterprise software for the company's market-proven SnapScale series of geographically-distributed, clustered scale-out data storage solutions that are optimized for cloud and distributed enterprise environments.

The Overland Storage RAINcloud OS 4.1 is the next major software release for SnapScale that includes software-defined storage services that intelligently and automatically execute operational data management and data protection operations without requiring manual intervention. With its self-provisioning, self-balancing and self-healing capabilities, SnapScale's storage resources seamlessly grow and shrink based on user needs, and are distributed for optimal performance, and recovered or rebuilt without any downtime. The data mobility tools included in RAINcloud OS 4.1 enable customers to build private clouds for sharing and synchronizing data for anywhere, anytime access.

"For a government agency, we selected a SnapScale scale-out solution from Overland Storage over other clustered NAS offerings due to its simplicity, scalability and strength of clustering functionality for distributed deployments," said Frank Scott, Sales Manager, Premier Systems Ltd. "It enabled our customer to consolidate data from several servers and individual workstations deployed on their campus to back up into a shared NAS storage repository. The distributed clustered architecture of RAINcloud OS kept the project within budget, by eliminating the need for any expensive clustering and data protection software that is typically added by competing offerings. I am confident that the SnapScale with RAINcloud OS solution will provide similar value to our other customers."

Additionally, SnapScale enterprise storage products have completed the VMware certification process for interoperability with vSphere 5.1 and 5.5. in a VMware-virtualized infrastructure.

"We are pleased that Overland Storage's SnapScale products qualify for the VMware Ready™ logo, signifying to customers that it has met specific VMware integration and interoperability standards and it works effectively with the VMware cloud infrastructure, which will speed time to value within customer environments," said Sanjay Katyal, vice president, Global Alliances & OEMs, VMware.

The software-defined storage services in RAINcloud OS 4.1 deliver new customer benefits including:

Performance & Security Services:

• Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 improves read and write performance for Windows clients and servers when accessing SnapServer storage.
• NFS version 4 provides performance enhancements and better security for UNIX users.
• Windows-only Tree improves Permission Handling and Authentication enabling Windows and UNIX/Mac users to easily share files in mixed environments.
• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) allows administrators to set permissions and specify access to directories through name lookup to and from a unique user identifier (UID).

Manageability & Availability Services:

• Highly-available with rolling updates provides 99.999% uptime with full system redundancy. After installing RAINcloud OS 4.1, future software versions automatically occur without requiring a cluster reboot or shut down.
• Performance monitoring with history allows administrators to run performance reports over specified time periods to optimize throughput and minimize network bottlenecks.
• VMware version vSphere 5.1 and 5.5 certification for NFS and iSCSI allows administrators to consolidate storage and run virtual machines on a SnapScale cluster.

Data Protection Services:

• Continuous Data Protection with High-Performance Snapshots enables more efficient capacity utilization, and offers up to 3x improvements in write performance. 
• Create Private Cloud, Protect Data and Access it Anywhere. Enables customers to conveniently create their own private cloud without the hassle, risk and expense of a third-party cloud service.

"The SnapScale scale-out solution, with the new RAINcloud OS 4.1 software, delivers on our vision to provide a software-defined IT infrastructure that enables customers with rapid or unpredictable data growth to infinitely scale capacity and performance without adding management complexity, even in geographically-distributed IT environments," said Nilesh Patel, Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing at Overland Storage. "With tighter VMware integration, our partners and customers can confidently deploy SnapScale solutions for their virtualized infrastructures."

Product Availability
The Overland Storage RAINcloud OS 4.1 software is available now for download by existing SnapScale customers and embedded in all new SnapScale units.

About SnapScale Series
Built on the Overland Storage RAINcloud OS technology, SnapScale eliminates islands of storage, enabling easy and affordable scaling without having to predict capacity in advance. Offering user-selectable levels of data redundancy, SnapScale writes data across multiple nodes and drives simultaneously for instant protection and high availability by ensuring no single point of failure ever exists. The SnapScale hardware architecture and "single pane of glass" management creates a consistent user experience while both managing the existing global namespace and scaling storage as needed without additional layers of administration.

About Overland Storage
Overland Storage is a trusted global provider of unified data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle. The Company delivers one of the most extensive and complementary product portfolios and service offerings in the industry. By providing an integrated range of technologies and services for primary, nearline, offline, and archival data storage, Overland Storage and Tandberg Data, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Overland, make it easy and cost-effective to manage different tiers of information over the data lifecycle, whether distributed data is across the hall or across the globe.

Overland Storage recently announced its proposed merger with Sphere 3D Corporation (NASDAQ: ANY) (TSX VENTURE: ANY). This alliance is intended to bring together next generation technologies for virtualization and cloud coupled with end-to-end scalable storage offerings designed to allow them to address the larger and growing virtualization and cloud markets. Overland Storage and Tandberg Data solutions are available through a select network of value-added resellers and system integrators. For more information, visit www.overlandstorage.com or www.tandbergdata.com.

Overland Storage, the Overland logo RAINcloud and SnapScale are trademarks of Overland Storage, Inc., and Tandberg Data is a trademark of Tandberg Data Holdings, S.à r.l. that may be registered in some jurisdictions. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

VMware, VMware Ready and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.