ONStor Moves to ZFS

ONStor, Inc. announced a new addition to its Pantera line of integrated storage systems, the Pantera LS 2100 series. The Pantera LS 2100 series is a family of unified IP storage solutions that provides both iSCSI and NAS support in a single system. Targeting small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), the Pantera LS 2100 packs an impressive array of data management features, self-healing capabilities, and advanced storage management to deliver significant cost savings. Expanding on its track record of deploying open storage technologies, ONStor has incorporated the industry-leading Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and open source technology into the Pantera LS series systems.

"By moving to OpenSolaris/ZFS, ONStor is on track to be a disruptive force in the storage industry by combining feature-rich, open source software with commodity hardware," said Simon Robinson, research director, storage, the 451 Group. "We believe ONStor’s unified message will play well with small and midrange enterprises because those organizations desire a single system to handle all of their storage requirements, not multiple silos that require separate management."

Maximum Flexibility, Simplified Management
Many SMEs use multi-vendor storage systems that are often spread throughout the organization, making storage management difficult and costly. With the Pantera LS 2100 series, companies can deploy a single storage solution that manages both block and file applications and provides transparent data movement for storage management from a single console. This significantly reduces the cost of storage capacity and administrative tasks up to 75 percent.

The Pantera 2130 and 2150 include a full suite of built-in enterprise-level data protection features including advanced RAID management (RAID 5 and 6), instantaneous snapshots and clones, differential replication for disaster recovery, and self-healing capabilities. In addition, the Pantera LS 2100 series provides thin provisioning and native compression that improves storage utilization by up to 50 percent. The Pantera 2130 and 2150’s advanced data protection and simplified management features make the products ideal for software development, home directory consolidation, web content, and block data applications including VMware, MS Exchange, and Oracle.

Adding to the already robust Pantera line of storage solutions, the Pantera LS 2100 series provides companies with a range of options to meet their performance, price and capacity requirements. Both the 2130 and the 2150 system use the ZFS hybrid storage pool to provide a simple, reliable storage system that can combine SAS or Flash SSD drives for high-performance, or SATA drives for high capacity, delivering the best combination of performance and capacity at an optimal price point.

"ONStor has always been a leading proponent of open storage technologies. Our initial focus was on allowing our customers to choose storage from any vendor for use with ONStor’s NAS gateways," said Bob Miller, CEO of ONStor. "Today, we’re expanding our use of open source software to deliver greater choice to our customers. We believe ZFS will become the predominant file system standard in enterprise environments, and ONStor intends to be at the forefront of this movement."

Benefits of the Pantera LS 2100 Series

1/ End-to-end data integrity designed with:

• Advanced RAID capabilities including RAID Z and RAID Z-DP (RAID 5 and 6)
• Unlimited, instantaneous snapshots and block-based incremental replication
• Predictive failure analysis
• Self-healing capabilities

2/ Increased storage utilization
and storage savings up to 50 percent with ZFS

• Thin provisioning
• Native compression
• Shared storage pool

3/ High-performance solutions:

• The Pantera 2130 delivers 15K NFS Ops
• The Pantera 2150 delivers 25K NFS Ops

4/ Multi-protocol system support
and automated data movement

5/ Integrated search functionality

ONStor will continue to expand and develop ZFS as a key component of its NAS gateway offerings, along with the EverON StorFS file system, on the company’s Cougar line of NAS gateways. ONStor will integrate the capabilities of the StorFS file system with ZFS to expand the performance and scalability of its NAS gateway solutions for medium and large enterprise environments.

Pricing and Availability
The Pantera LS 2130 and 2150 are available immediately and are sold exclusively through ONStor’s distribution and reseller channels worldwide. The Pantera LS 2130 is scalable up to 48 drives of SAS or SATA and has a list price of $36,000 with 15TB of SATA storage. The Pantera LS 2150 is scalable up to 96 drives of SAS, SATA and SSD and has a list price of $39,500 with 15TB of SATA storage.