Overland Storage has introduced the REO Business Continuity Appliance (BCA) that reportedly helps small and medium-sized businesses to protect applications and data as well as physical and virtual server environments.

According to the company, the new appliance leverages Overland’s REO Series disk-based backup and recovery VTL to integrate a single appliance with a streamlined approach for both continuous local backup and remote disaster recovery.

Overland said that the new appliance automates the recovery of data and applications at both the local data centre and remote disaster recovery sites by combining capacity-optimised replication technology with application-aware failover and failback. It results in availability of business applications, such as email, databases and unstructured files, along with the ability to recover from any point in time or event.

The new appliance features include: integration with Windows/Linux file services, Microsoft Exchange and SQL as well as support for virtualised environments, including VMware, and Hyper-V; server, storage and network hardware independence to facilitate tiered storage approach for disaster recovery; and centralised management and reporting, including an Environmental Profiler for analysing data, network and storage resource utilisation.

The company also said that patented point-in-time ‘book marking’ technology enables ‘near-zero’ Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives (RPO/RTO).