ONStor Takes Aim at Midmarket With NAS Gateway Cougar 3000

ONStor, Inc. announced its new Cougar 3000 Series NAS gateways aimed at small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The Cougar 3310 and Cougar 3510 are the first in this new series of Cougar products offered by the company. The Cougar 3000 Series will start at entry level price points and deliver data center class performance in an energy efficient, compact 1u form factor. The products are ideal for file server consolidation, persistent data archives, digital image repositories or support for applications such as video streaming, genomics, M-CAD or SaaS.

"ONStor has recognized the needs of the midmarket with their latest round of new products. SMBs and workgroups continue to seek reliable, appropriately- priced file storage solutions that allows them to leverage existing storage investments, start small and scale big without having to rip and replace devices, and enjoy significant power and space efficiency," said Benjamin S. Woo, Vice President, Enterprise Storage Systems, IDC. "In today’s economy, all of those savings really add up."

Cougar 3000 Series customers can leverage many of the enterprise class features of ONStor’s Cougar 6000, including the EverScale redundant modular architecture, heterogeneous storage virtualization, and advanced multi-core storage network processors, but at workgroup price points. All of ONStor’s Cougar models can be mixed and matched in a single cluster with the flexibility to scale performance and capacity independently as needed. The ability of the ONStor Cougar 3000 Series gateways to support heterogeneous storage means that they can be used with an organization’s existing SAN storage for plug and play convenience and added investment protection.

"Midmarket companies have even smaller IT budgets and less resources than large enterprises to house space- and power-hungry storage devices," said Tom Gallivan, senior vice president, worldwide sales at ONStor. "With the Cougar 3000 Series, we’re enabling SMEs to control system and management costs by consolidating their file server footprint, simplifying the management of unstructured data and providing a platform for growth in two dimensions — performance or capacity. In addition, the Cougar platform delivers measureable OPEX reductions in space, power, and cooling in the client’s IT environment."

Specifications of ONStor Cougar 3000 Series include:
Cougar 3310

• Processor: 900MHz Broadcom SiByte 1480 with 5 effective cores
• 8GB memory
• 4 GigE ports, 4 FE ports

Cougar 3510

• Processor: 900MHz Broadcom SiByte 1480 with 6 effective cores
• 8GB memory
• 4 GigE ports, 4 FE ports
• Higher performance than 3310

Pricing and Availability
The Cougar 3310 and 3510 are available immediately. The Cougar 3310 has a list price of $31,995 and the Cougar 3510 has a list price of $54,995.