Sphere 3D Releases V50 Hyper-Converged Virtual Desktop Appliance to Benefit Distributed Workgroups and Small Offices

SAN JOSE, CA and MISSISSAUGA, ON--(Marketwired - Dec 4, 2014) - Sphere 3D Corporation (TSX VENTURE: ANY) (NASDAQ: ANY), a leading provider of virtualization technology solutions, today announced the expansion of its family of purpose-built V3 hyper-converged virtual desktop appliances with the addition of the V50.This new addition provides simplified deployment and management for distributed virtual desktop environments with fewer than 50 desktops. Sphere 3D offers a series of V3 virtual desktop appliances, including the V50, V100 and V200, to meet requirements ranging from 50 to 200 virtual Windows desktops per appliance, with scalability up to 10,000 desktops or more.

Sphere 3D's V3 appliances are delivered pre-provisioned for quick and easy installation into existing IT environments, eliminating long and costly deployments typical of virtual desktop implementations. The new V50 appliance is specifically designed to address the needs of smaller distributed workgroups and offices while providing exceptional price-performance metrics. The V50 is also ideal for virtual desktop projects in larger enterprises and institutions that want the flexibility to scale their VDI environment by adding V3 appliances in increments of 50, 100 or 200 desktops.

"V3 Appliances uniquely help businesses to recognize the value of virtual desktops. Many VDI implementations get stalled when users experience slower-than-physical-PC performance with traditional SAN-based VDI architectures," said Nilesh Patel, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing at Sphere 3D. "Our unique distributed computing architecture provides the fastest virtual desktop experience on the market today. The addition of the V50 adds flexibility for enterprise-wide implementations of VDI that are designed to host the desktops as close to the users as possible, while still enabling central management."

All V3 Appliances integrate compute, storage and network interface, as well as the required hypervisor infrastructure, and are managed by Sphere 3D's Desktop Cloud Orchestrator™ (DCO) management software. DCO software dramatically simplifies set-up, maintenance and failover of desktop pools, making it possible for desktop administrators to remain in control of their desktops, manage infrastructure locally or in remote locations, all without specialized virtualization certifications. DCO's software architecture enables V3 appliances to be a single turn-key appliance solution that delivers high-availability failover architecture, eliminates performance bottlenecks and installation problems, and provides predictable cost for VDI deployments.

Mr. Alan Loh, Senior Sales Director at Datum Technology Pte Ltd, a leading enterprise solution value-added distributor (VAD) in Singapore, said, "We were introduced to the V3 VDI hyper-converged appliance at vForum in Singapore and are very excited to have a product like V3 in our portfolio. V3 appliances offer a unique value proposition and remain highly differentiated from traditional converged infrastructure or solutions trying to use clustered storage file systems. Additionally, the added capability of scaling storage separately from desktop computing should create greater flexibility for our customers."

Unique Benefits of the V3 Appliance Series:

• Ease & Flexibility of Deployment: The purpose-built, all-in-one V3 Appliance incorporates storage, compute and management in a single rack-mounted chassis. V3 Appliances can be deployed and managed in a public, private, or hybrid model and scale up and out for industry-leading flexibility when deployed locally or in a datacenter.
• Breakthrough Operational Simplicity: The V3 Desktop Cloud Orchestrator (DCO) management software streamlines virtual desktop pool administration with dynamic provisioning for maximum resource utilization, failover for high availability, and the flexibility to migrate pools between public and private clouds.
• Predictable & Consistent Performance: By removing legacy VDI bottlenecks, the V3 virtual desktop appliance maintains consistent levels of performance for each V3 user, typically two to eight times faster than physical PCs.
• Secure Desktop Computing: The V3 Appliance architecture delivers highly-secure desktop computing because no data is stored on, or transferred to, the user's desktop. Administrators have the ability to control access in real time.
• Scalability: VDI typically requires additional storage for user data. Sphere 3D completes the V3 virtual desktop solution with optional SnapServer and SnapScale storage solutions that deliver cost-effective, reliable and infinitely-scalable performance and capacity.

Price & Availability
The V50 Appliance, optimized to serve up to 50 virtual desktops is immediately available worldwide from authorized channel partners of Overland Storage, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sphere 3D.

About Sphere 3D
Sphere 3D Corporation (TSX VENTURE: ANY) (NASDAQ: ANY) is a virtualization technology solution provider with a portfolio of products that address the complete data continuum from active data to data at rest. Dedicated to continue to lead through innovation, Sphere 3D enables the integration of virtual applications, virtual desktops, and storage into workflow, and allows organizations to deploy a combination of public, private or hybrid cloud strategies. Sphere 3D's Glassware 2.0® platform delivers virtualization of some of the most demanding applications in the marketplace today, making it easy to move applications from a physical PC or workstation to a virtual environment. Sphere 3D's V3 converged infrastructure solutions include one of the industry's first purpose-built appliances for virtualization and the Desktop Cloud Orchestrator™ management software for VDI. Overland Storage and Tandberg Data, wholly-owned subsidiaries of Sphere 3D, provide an integrated range of technologies and services for primary, nearline, offline, and archival data storage through their data storage, data management and data backup brands, SnapServer®, SnapScale®, SnapSan®, NEO® and RDX®, that make it easy and cost-effective to manage different tiers of information over the data lifecycle. For additional information, visit www.sphere3d.com, www.overlandstorage.com, and www.tandbergdata.com.

Overland Storage and the Overland logo 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.