With NetApp in its sights — specifically, the FAS3070A, FAS6040A, and FAS6080A — ONStor today announced the Cougar 6000 series of NAS gateways, which are higher-performance versions of the company’s Bobcat NAS gateways.
The company claims that the Cougar line can deliver more than 400,000 SpecSFS ops per cluster (101,000 ops per filer), 840MBps in sequential read operations and 740MBps in sequential write operations. The systems can scale to support up to 4PB of capacity.
Two models are available — the Cougar 6520 (which competes with NetApp’s FAS3070A filer) and the 6720 (which competes with the FAS6080A). Common features of the 2U disk-less NAS gateways include active-active dual NAS blades per filer, support for NFS and CIFS, 2GB to 4PB of capacity, eight front-end Gigabit Ethernet ports and eight 4Gbps back-end Fibre Channel ports, 64-bit multi-core processors (up to 18 cores per filer), and support for heterogeneous back-end storage devices.
Users can configure the Cougar gateways with up to eight nodes (four filers) per cluster, and 32 virtual servers per cluster.
Pricing starts at $122,500, including the EverON operating system and EverON StorFS file system. A dual-filer Cougar 6720 with clustering software is priced at $300,000. Software functionality includes snapshots, support for NDMP, asynchronous mirroring, replication, auto-provisioning, and a global namespace for file system virtualization.
ONStor hopes to capitalize on the explosion in NAS capacity growth at the high end of the market. For example, in an end-user survey conducted by TheInfoPro research firm, Fortune 1000 companies report an anticipated 41% growth in NAS capacity on average over the next year. At those Fortune 1000 companies, the average NAS capacity was 350TB, of which about 70% was utilized.
