Today they started delivering on those promises with scalability and high availability enhancements. The SL8500 Modular Library System – the largest in the platform — now scales to 100,000 tape slots, up from 70,000. The SL8500 also now supports LTO-5 tape cartridges with 1.5 TB of native capacity. With the improvements, the SL8500 can scale to 1.5 PB of native capacity – more than twice its previous capacity.

Oracle also added redundant hot swappable robotics and library control cards to the SL8500 with automatic failover capabilities.

Oracle product marketing manager Tom Wultich said the focus of the upgrade was helping the largest enterprises that use the SL8500 keep up with data growth.

“Tape drives double in capacity every two years, but data is growing faster than that,” Wultich said. “Our largest customers need to be able to keep up with that growth, so we’re offering nearly three times an improvement in capacity.”

The NEO 8000e scales to 3 PB of capacity with 1,000 cartridges and 24 tape drives and supports LTO-5 and LTO-4. The library will eventually replace the NEO 8000 – Overland’s previous high-end library. Besides scaling higher, the differences between the 8000e and 8000 are the 8000e has embedded connectivity with Fibre Channel, SAS and SCSI drives embedded while the 8000 requires bridge cards for each protocol, and the 8000e requires no hardware requirements for partitioning. Overland’s director of product marketing for tape products Peri Grover says the vendor will offer an upgrade kit for 8000 customers who want to go to the 8000e.

The Neo8000e will compete with enterprise drives from Quantum and the Oracle Sun StorageTek platform.

“We see a lot of interest from the legacy StorageTek-installed base,” Grover said.

Pricing starts at $47,999 for the Neo8000e.

The SnapServer N2000 is the new high end of Overland’s NAS platform, which also supports iSCSI through Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) and VDS (Virtual Disk Services). The 2U unit is available with four or six Ethernet ports and scales to 144 TB. The previous high end of the SnapServer NAS line, the 850, is a 1U model with four Ethernet ports.

“This is the top end of our NAS line,” Overland product marketing manager for network storage products Drew O’Brien said. “It’s for customers who need performance and scalability in simple IT environments. Maybe they bought NAS in the consumer space before and now need something more sophisticated.”

O’Brien says the NS2000 will compete with EMC Iomega and NetGear NAS devices. Pricing starts at $4,999 for 4 TB and $5,999 for 8 TB.

While these products are a step up from what Overland already had, they’re hardly enough to turn around a company that has suffered heavy financial losses for years. Considering Overland CEO Eric Kelly has put together a distinguished team including VP of engineering Geoff Barrall and VP of sales and marketing Julian Mansolf, we can expect more product rollouts soon.