Now that its naming travails have been sorted out -- or so ONStor hopes, anyway -- the startup is getting ready to bring its SAN/NAS appliance to market. Miller says ONStor is shooting to deliver a beta version in the third quarter and ship revenue-generating product in the fourth.
And what is ONStor's product? Think file services on a SAN, geared toward disk-based backup, and you're most of the way there. A key difference is that ONStor will not sell any storage with its SAN filer. "A very strong emphasis of ours will be to work with solution providers and systems integrators to let them build a solution around this," Miller says. "With EMC Centera or Network Appliance Inc. [Nasdaq: NTAP] NearStore, you have to buy your disk storage from them." ONStor has certified its appliance to work with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc. arrays.
Other firms doing NAS gateways include: Auspex Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ASPX), MaXXan Systems Inc., NetApp, and Spinnaker Networks Inc.
ONStor's appliance will have Gigabit Ethernet ports on the front and 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel out the back, Miller says. It will run a "true heterogeneous file system," he says, meaning it allows access to the same file via either CIFS or NFS.
There's one additional detail Miller is willing to share: The appliance will run a 64-bit processor. "You need very high performance for these systems," he says. Would that be Intel Corp.'s (Nasdaq: INTC) Itanium chip? For now, ONStor isn't saying.
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