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Overland Buys Snap, Adaptec Gets Out of NAS Biz

Today Adaptec dumped their money loosing Snap Appliance division, once as much a mindshare leader in NAS as NetApp, to Overland Storage for $3.6 million after buying it just 4 years ago for $100 million. Overland gets a quality line of NAS appliances to add to its mix of tape libraries, REO VTL/disk backup appliances and Ultamus Fibre Channel RAID arrays along with a sublet of Snap's plant and around 50 employees. Adaptec will keep the top of the line 700 series iSCSI arrays and get to concentrate on RAID controllers.

Despite being an early player in the NAS market and selling 200,000 units over the years several generations of management at at least three different owners including Quantum and Meridian Data have struggled to make Snap profitable. Overland reports that Snap will add $18 million a year to their sales and hopes to make it profitable in 9 months or so.

There may well be a few synergies here. Overland and Snap both had a channel based go to market strategy and Overland's channel partners are incredably loyal having stuck with them through some hard times after Overland lost HP's OEM tape library business a few years ago. Snap's NAS appliances had better features, performance and scalability than their Windows Storage Server based midmarket competitors from Iomega to HP and Dell. Finally both Overland's REO and Snap's Guardian OS are based on the Linux 2.6 kernel so some Snap features, like replication, could show up in REOs or Overland could come up with a new product that combines the features of both.

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