News

posted on 15 July 2008 13:18

Clustered NAS supplier ONStor has introduced a new faster and bigger NAS gateway, the Cougar 6000, with twice the performance and quadruple the capacity of the existing Bobcat model.

The Cougar supports an 8-node cluster compared to Bobcat's six, and its maximum capacity is 4 petabytes compared to Bobcat's single petabyte. The maximum throughput is 3GB/sec compared to Bobcat's 1.5GB/sec. Cougar has a 64-bit pipelined architecture with 18 processing cores per node and built-in TCP/IP offload. The maximum node memory is 16GB with 32GB on the roadmap.

ONStor rates a single filer node at 101,000 SpecSFS operations, claiming this is up to twice the price-performance of competing products.

The product has been designed as a 'cluster in a box' to store much more unstructured data but with no increase in management resources. It features heterogeneous virtualization of block storage arrays behind it.

ONStor CEO Bob Miller said: "Cougar expands ONStor’s market addressability to now include everyone from mid-range to high end enterprises. ... It's not just about managing and storing data, it's about cutting costs through storage and server consolidation, energy efficiency, leveraging existing storage infrastructure, and tiering storage."

ONStor says that the Cougar design delivers high throughput, the smallest footprint per rack unit, excellent power and cooling efficiency, and low cost per terabyte. This enables enterprises to process more data for less and stay in their current data centers longer.

Steve Duplessie, president and senior analyst, ESG, said: "With all the different sizes, types, and attribute requirements of files today users have been forced to compromise. ONStor's Cougar seems to have nailed the requirements for true mixed workload environments – from streaming media to lots of small file I/O – all with massive scale and easy management. This system’s merits are hard to argue with."

Cougar has 8 GigE ports and 8 Fibre Channel ports per filer, n-way high availability, and supports 32 virtual servers per cluster.

It is available today world-wide at a starting list price of $122,500 for a filer inclusive of a comprehensive set of NAS management software.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}