ONStor, 3PAR Take on the Big Boys

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ONStor and 3PAR unveiled new storage offerings on Monday that they hope will give users an alternative to Network Appliance and EMC.

ONStor said its new Pantera Clustered NAS system undercuts the price of midrange solutions from NetApp by 50 percent.

And 3PAR unveiled the InServ E200 Storage Server, which the company said compares favorably to EMC’s Clariion CX3 model 40.

ONStor marketing vice president Jon Toor said the new Pantera Clustered NAS system is one of the few general-purpose NAS systems targeted at mid-level enterprises, competing directly with NetApp and EMC. Other offerings, like those from Isilon, Panasas, Ibrix, Polyserve and BlueArc, tend to be application-specific offerings aimed at the high end, he said.

“There are only a few general-purpose solutions on the market right now, and it’s half the cost, so what’s not to like?” asked Toor.

Pantera offers 2.7GB per second performance, multi-petabyte capacity, server virtualization, n-way clustering, snapshot and replication, and starts at $40,000 for a full-function system with 6TB of SATAdisk. High-performance 15K SASdisks are also available. Clustered solutions with 12TB of storage and enhanced high-availability features are available for under $100,000.

Toor claims high satisfaction for ONStor’s 170 customers — one survey found that all of them would buy from the company again, he said.

MyPhotoAlbum.com, already an ONStor Bobcast gateway customer, chose Pantera when it went shopping for a NAS solution.

“ONStor Pantera provides the right combination of cost and scalability for us,” said Chris Ferry, director of operations at MyPhotoAlbum.com. “We looked at NetApp, but they did not scale; you spend $200,000, grow to a set capacity, and then you have to spend another $200,000 for a second system. With Pantera, we can add either performance or capacity as we need, which saves us cost and management resources.”

3PAR Moves Down Market

3PAR, meanwhile, moved into the hotly contested midrange with the InServ E200 Storage Server.

The E200, a midrange version of 3PAR’s high-end InServ S400 and S800 arrays, is aimed at departmental, replicated site and remote data center deployments. It uses the same InForm Operating System and software as 3PAR’s S-Class Storage Servers and offers Fibre Channel and iSCSI host connectivity.

3PAR CEO David Scott said the E200 offers a number of advantages over the EMC Clariion CX3, including common data management, flexible deployments, advanced functionality and active/active capability for load balancing, among other features.

Scott said the E200 is aimed at existing customers, who make up 60 percent of the company’s business. With 170 customers and a 110 percent compound annual growth rate, Scott said 3PAR is cash-flow positive, yet has no plans for an IPO. Customers include MySpace.com and Priceline.

The E200 repackages 3PAR’s InSpire architecture in a new modular form factor that scales from 16 to 128 drives and from 2 to 63 terabytes using 147GB Fibre Channel, 300GB Fibre Channel or 500GB Nearline drives.

The same 3PAR Utility Storage software that provides fine-grained internal virtualization for the InServ S-Class is also available for the InServ E-Class, including Rapid Provisioning, Dynamic Optimization, Thin Provisioning, Virtual Copy and Remote Copy.

Pricing for an InServ E200 Storage Server with 2.3 terabytes of capacity, four Fibre Channel host ports and the InForm Operating Suite (including Rapid Provisioning, Access Guard and Full Copy software) starts at less than $65,000.

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Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

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