OnStor sets Cougar loose

New NAS gateway smoothes path to storage virtualisation

Storage vendor OnStor has launched its latest network attached storage (NAS) gateway platform, the Cougar 6000 series, targeting large enterprises looking to virtualise their storage systems.

The Cougar platform represents a "big enhancement" over its previous Bobcat system, said OnStor co-founder and chief designer Brian Stark.

"It uses an active-active configuration, and now has field-replaceable fans, power supplies and blades, which means the system doesn't have to be powered down for hardware failures or software upgrades," he told IT Week.

ONStor has added two quad-core processors on each motherboard and another core responsible for system management through its Linux operating system.

The 2U chassis contains 18 processors, up from just six in the Bobcat system, and will be offered in two Cougar models: the 6720 and the 6520. The main difference in the models is the number of cores that the OnStor software has turned on, said Stark. The 6520 uses 12 cores and the 6720 uses 14. "We'll still have over a fifth of the processing power in reserve for performance upgrades further down the road," added Stark.

Cougar's system memory has increased to 16GB and the platform can potentially address up to 4 Petabytes of storage. Cougar also promises far better network connectivity.

The system has four gigabit Ethernet ports per blade, which the user can specify as copper or fibre. It also has four 4Gbit/s fibre channel ports per balde – and with its PCI Express expansion capability it could potentially support 10 gigabit Ethernet connections in the future.

Demand for storage virtualisation was being driven by the large increase in unstructured data that firms needed to deal with, said ONStor's chief executive Bob Miller. "Digital media, geophysical data acquisition, human genomics and many other fields need more storage, and we're having to continually reassess our predictions about what firms will require," said Miller.

Stark said that ONStor had also increased the power efficiency of Cougar by increasing performance, but keeping a similar power consumption to the earlier Bobcat system.