ONStor, 3PAR Unify Storage

ONStor and 3PAR have teamed on a new unified storage offering that the companies say tops Network Appliance in performance, scalability and manageability.

The new UtiliCat offers enterprise-class consolidated SAN and NAS services through the combination of ONStor’s Enterprise NAS Gateway solutions and 3PAR’s Utility Storage technology. Unlike other unified storage approaches that require customers to deploy and manage multiple storage silos, UtiliCat can manage storage as one efficient pool with just one console each from ONStor and 3PAR, the companies say.

“UtiliCat brings together two innovative next-generation storage products into one solution,” said Tony Asaro, senior analyst at 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. … This partnership makes a ton of sense and brings a great deal of value to customers.”

In fact, the idea for the offering came from joint customers of the two companies who had “pieced it together themselves and encouraged us to make it easier,” said ONStor marketing vice president Jon Toor.

“There’s nothing like this in the market, not even close,” said Geoff Hough, 3PAR’s product marketing director.

UtiliCat scales non-disruptively from 2.5 to 384 terabytes and from one to eight NAS gateways in a single high-availability cluster, and provides non-disruptive rebalancing of up to 400 virtual file systems. The offering also bests NetApp’s FAS980 offerings in IOPS and throughput, 3PAR and ONStor claim.

“We beat the pants off NetApp, which is always nice to do,” Toor said.

Nicholas Tang, director of operations for Community Connect Inc., switched from NetApp to UtiliCat and liked the result.

“We did switch, and we’re definitely happy,” Tang said. “The new solution is faster, much more flexible, allows us to reuse resources from one pool (our SAN) rather than have separate pools of dedicated storage, is much more scalable, and got us much better bang for the buck.”

Pricing for a complete UtiliCat solution starts at about $175,000.

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