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ONStor Adds Its Own Back End: Page 2 of 4

Miller says ONStor’s clustered system will enable it to scale better than NetApp and EMC NAS at a much lower price. Pantera systems are available with SAS and SATA drives. Pricing starts at $40,000 for 6 Tbytes and Miller says 12-Tbyte appliances begin at under $100,000.

ONStor will continue to sell the Bobcat gateways separately for use with any vendors’ storage systems, Miller says. The vendor will maintain its partnerships with 3PAR, Compellent, Nexsan, and Xiotech to sell integrated NAS-SAN systems that compete with NetApp’s unified storage. (See Vendors Play Integration Duet and ONStor, Nexsan Deliver NAS.)

Miller says ONStor has been picking up about 25 customers per quarter and has close to 200, but his thinking has changed about their buying patterns. He says more and more customers are looking for an appliance, not a standalone gateway, because they typically don't have disk arrays and do not want to use two vendors for a NAS. Until Pantera, customers who bought Bobcats and did not have disk to use spent money with other vendors that Miller thinks could better go to ONStor.

"Eighty percent of our customers said when they bought ONStor they bought new storage, even if they had existing storage available," Miller says. "Historically, people spend one dollar on the gateway and three dollars on storage. We found it frustrating to watch us get one dollar when we did all the hard work, and watch the customer who wanted to buy storage from us spend three dollars on somebody else.”

Analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group estimates that gateways will account for about 70 percent of ONStor's sales going forward, but he says having the integrated system will prevent it from losing deals.