ONStor Launches Cougar 6000 NAS Gateway

ONStor Inc. announced the launch of the Cougar 6000 series NAS gateway, the first data center class clustered storage that affordably delivers the scalability, data availability, and high performance required by large enterprises and data-intensive environments. Cougar significantly lowers the total cost of managing unstructured data in the face of today’s explosive growth of content, enabling more data to be managed with fewer resources. Featuring the ONStor EverScale redundant modular architecture, heterogeneous storage virtualization, and advanced multi-core storage network processors, Cougar gives enterprises the flexibility to grow quickly and respond to storage need fluctuations without business disruption while maximizing power and cooling efficiency.

"Cougar expands ONStor’s market addressability to now include everyone from mid-range to high end enterprises. ONStor is changing the landscape of IT by delivering business value to companies and bringing down the cost of scaling up. 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," said Bob Miller, CEO, ONStor.

ONStor’s new Cougar line is an open data center class networked storage solution that can scale up to 4 petabytes and 400K+ SpecSFS Ops in a cluster. With nearly twice the price/performance efficiency as compared to systems from the competition — 1.6x better on cost per IOP and 2x better on cost per MB/s — Cougar is an ideal platform for scaling unstructured content storage in the next generation data center. Its ‘cluster-in-a-box’ design delivers the high availability organizations need to meet strict SLAs from within a small, space and energy saving footprint.

"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," said Steve Duplessie, president and senior analyst, ESG.

Cougar’s Advanced Features Significantly Lower Opex and Capex
The heterogeneous storage virtualization built into Cougar makes it the leading high-performance content storage solution to consolidate and centralize management and provisioning of multi-vendor storage, dramatically reducing operational and capital expenditures. Customers can leverage the storage they already have, protecting their existing investments, and add new storage from other vendors or from ONStor.

The EverScale system architecture upon which Cougar is built is a patent pending scalable redundant modular architecture which delivers massive, independent scalability of performance and capacity with high data availability and near-zero downtime. It enables companies to grow their business and instantly respond to fluctuations in storage needs without downtime.

Cougar’s advanced multi-core storage network processors are built into a highly available ‘cluster-in-a-box’ design offering 18 cores per filer. This delivers high throughput, 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.

Specifications of ONStor Cougar include:

• Active/Active Dual NAS blade delivers a ‘Cluster-in-a-Box’ high availability solution
• Supports open storage that is centrally managed and provisioned on a just-in-time basis
• 100K SpecSFS ops per filer
• Solid state design in a compact, energy efficient chassis
• Multi-core, 64-bit pipelined network processor architecture
• Heterogeneous, open SAN storage support
• Compact, real-time EverON storage operating system — Multi-protocol (NFS, CIFS) file serving
• Advanced features such as n-way high availability clustering, server virtualization, and pooled storage management
• 8-node cluster for high availability
• 32 Virtual Servers per cluster
• Best-in-class EverON software suite for data management & data protection features
• 8 GigE ports, 8 FC ports per filer

The Cougar 6000 series is available today from ONStor and its partners in the United States, Europe, and Japan at a starting list price of $122,500 for a filer inclusive of a comprehensive set of NAS management software. ONStor systems are deployed across a wide range of demanding enterprise IT applications, including large-scale Windows server consolidation, Internet content delivery, and digital imaging.