This post is part of a series of 10 vendors that have presented their technology to the TechFieldDay attendees, gathered for this edition of Storage Field Day 4. You can find all background about the project here: http://techfieldday.com/event/sfd4/ – This series of blogposts were live notes, published at the end of the presentation but reviewed afterwards. Disclaimer: the attendees are not personally compensated other than our transport and lodging, nor are we obliged to write anything at all.

Company

• Founded: 1980
• Founders: Marty Gray, Bob Long
• Financial Status: public (NASDAQ:OVRL)
• CEO: Eric L. Kelly

Technology

SnapScale is the NAS product line of Overland Storage. There are 2 basic models, the x2 and the x4. The x2 is a 2U, 12drive node and the x4 is a 4U, 36drive machine. They cluster in a minimum of 3 nodes. the x2 is a performance model, the x4 is a capacity model. The x2 and x4 nodes can all be grouped in a single global namespace. 

The volumes are spread out over multiple nodes and there are 2 redundancy methods: 2-way and 3-way. Basically a file resides on at least 2 or 3 nodes and on a 3-way redundancy you could have 2 nodes failure. The unit of measurement is a drive. 

Every node has 2 roles: client acces & storage provider. The fronted connects trough SMB(2.1), NFS or FTP. The backend however is a sharded technology instead of RAID. One shard is 512k. When nodes are added, the indexes of the hashes will be re-balanced.

Here is an architecture overview

My Take

This is the one that challenged me whether or not I should have done this liveblog project, writing about every single vendor. At the end of this presentation we all kind of agreed this is not really going to be a disruptive player in the ScaleOut NAS market. There are a few gotchas that make this environment pretty old school and even dangerous from a failure domain level perspective. Next to just gotchas this is just plain wrong architecture. It’s everything you want from scale-out NAS … exactly 10 years ago. Somehow it feels someone designed this back then and took it out of the closet just a few months ago.

I know this seems harsh but sometimes we need to help both the customers and the vendors. To the customers I say: look further. To Overland I say: throw away the blueprints and start over.

Links

• website – http://www.overlandstorage.com/
• twitter – @overlandstorage
• RAINcloud OS: LINK

Video

Off course I can be wrong as well with my opinion. Feel free to go through the presentations below and let me know.