ONStor/3PAR Introduce UtiliCat: Industrys First Utility-Class Unified Storage

ONStor Inc, the leader in Enterprise NAS Gateway solutions, and 3PAR, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today the release of UtiliCat, a new unified storage offering that delivers enterprise-class consolidated SAN and NAS services. Unlike other unified storage approaches that force customers to deploy and manage multiple storage silos, UtiliCat merges the proven technology of ONStors NAS Gateways and 3PARs Utility Storage arrays in a dramatically simple and efficient utility computing architecture.

UtiliCat delivers tiered block- and file-level data access and management services ideal for a broad range of open-systems applications in a space-efficient, highly expandable form factor. Inside UtiliCat, all disk-based storage resides on a highly scalable 3PAR InServ Storage Server, which also provides direct access to SAN-based storage for application servers. ONStors Bobcat NAS Gateways provide file services from the same consolidated and re-purposeable capacity pool. Unique enterprise features combine to provide the following unmatched benefits:

A single, massively scalable storage pool which can be provisioned for an organisations mission critical unstructured and structured data requirements, maximising utilisation, flexibility and efficient administration;

Advanced ONStor/3PAR cluster designs deliver modular, independent and highly scalable SAN/NAS performance and connectivity, eliminating wasteful over-provisioning, headroom restrictions, and disruptive growth associated with traditional architectures;

Automated load balancing and provisioning provides set it and forget it block- and file-level services;

Single-command data lifecycle management delivers simple and perfectly optimised data service levels over the application lifecycle, leveraging both online and nearline capacity;

Thin Provisioning, high-performance RAID 5, and a 3x gateway price/performance advantage minimise capacity and infrastructure purchases;

Uniquely space-efficient local and remote replication facilities mean that the highest levels of recoverability for any application are now affordable;

A certified solution backed by joint testing and support assures customers they are only a single call away from a comprehensive response.

UtiliCat brings together two innovative next generation storage products into one solution," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "ONStor and 3PAR provide an extremely compelling enterprise-class NAS and SAN offering that is competitive on a number of levels including scalability, manageability, performance, and reliability. UtiliCat can significantly reduce administrative costs and storage expenditures while providing best-in-class SAN and NAS features and functions. This partnership makes a ton of sense and brings a great deal of value to customers. "

UtiliCat delivers cost, productivity, and utilisation benefits

UtiliCat features integrated storage and processing virtualisation that enhances service levels and increases utilisation. With UtiliCat, administrators can deploy resources in a matter of seconds whenever and wherever they are needed while simultaneously reducing administration efforts by 90% or more. Its advanced virtualisation architecture also means customers can achieve high levels of availability and performance while cutting capacity and related costs by up to 75%. With their SPECsfs results, ONStor and 3PAR have already demonstrated leadership, linearly scalable open NAS gateway performance, and disk capacity cost savings of 65% with the use of 3PAR Thin Provisioning. Additional ONStor and 3PAR SPECsfs results highlight how, with UtiliCat virtualisation, data service levels can be optimised (for example, converting volumes from RAID 1 to RAID 5) simply and online, with negligible impact to performance.

"Simplicity, flexibility and cost-effective scalability led us to select UtiliCat for our critical web services," said Nicholas Tang, Director of Operations at Community Connect, Inc. "UtiliCat gave us a unified, highly virtualised environment that simplifies management, boosts uptime, and improves resource utilisation.

UtiliCat scales non-disruptively from 2.5 to 384 terabytes, and from one to eight NAS gateways in a single high-availability cluster with, and provides non-disruptive rebalancing of up to 400 virtual file systems. Multiple UtiliCat clusters can be supported with the same 3PAR storage array. SAN controllers scale from two to eight in a single cache-coherent and massively load-balanced cluster, with native SAN connectivity ranging from 4 to 128 Fibre Channel ports. UtiliCat is a certified 3PAR/ONStor solution that is jointly tested and supported.

With UtiliCat, companies finally have an enterprise-class solution that allows them to deploy unified storage in a manner that is simple, efficient, and scalable, said Bob Miller, CEO of ONStor. UtiliCats integrated virtualisation and all-inclusive data management abilities enable businesses to deploy a scalable enterprise storage infrastructure for a broad range of applications, providing a needed solution for the marketplace that delivers extreme flexibility and high return on investment.

UtiliCat delivers scaling without administrative headaches, offers high performance without high costs, and lets customers turn on a dime to meet changing requirements, said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. Unified storage doesnt need to come in a silo-ed network appliance, and UtilityCat proves it by delivering seamless enterprise-scale growth.