ONStor, Nexsan Partner on Integrated NAS Appliance

ONStor Inc. today launched its Pantera integrated gateway and storage systems, a low-end line of turnkey appliances using ONStor's NAS gateway and SATABoy RAID storage from Nexsan Technologies Inc. The products are designed to be sold by systems integrators and tech resellers.

The Pantera 3100 and 3110-HA file virtualization products are designed to be simple to install and manage, and promise enterprise-level high availability at a relatively low cost. ONStor said the Pantera products are aimed at small and mid-sized companies and enterprise workgroups, and can easily be expanded to offer more capacity or performance. Each one includes RAID 5 and RAID 6 capabilities, up to four virtual servers, snapshots, a scalable file system and clustering capabilities. They also offer up to 8 Gbytes of memory and four Fibre Channel ports that connect up to 42 Tbytes of SATA drives.

"We have containers in a two-node cluster that provide 32 distinct IP addresses, which means users can consolidate file servers into a virtual file server entity that lets each department or division still have its own unique IP address within that cluster," Tom Gallivan, senior vice president for worldwide sales, told Byte and Switch. "It just looks like a set of dedicated file servers."

A key differentiator, Gallivan said, is the clustering available in the two-node 3100-HA version, which is designed to offer high availability. "More than 90 percent of customers are buying clustered NAS and we are offering a new concept in clustering," he said. "We have customers that are running three or four or five node clusters, and we've tested up a cluster with up to eight nodes."

The two Pantera products come in at the low end of ONStor's NAS gateway product line, below the higher-end Cougar products. The 3110 with 7 Tbytes of storage has an estimated street price of $30,000, and the 3110-HA with 10 Tbytes of storage runs around $50,000, the company said.George Crump, founder of analyst firm Storage Switzerland and a blogger on storage on our sister site InformationWeek.com, noted that the growth of unstructured data is hitting smaller companies hard because "these organizations have even smaller IT budgets and less resources to house space- and power-hungry storage devices than large enterprises." He said the Pantera products can let small and mid-sized companies consolidate their file server footprint and management and cut power consumption costs.