ONStor Hits NAS Gas

NAS startup ONStor Inc. will try to extend its reach with a new gateway launched this week.

The product, dubbed the ONStor Bobcat NAS Gateway, arrives slightly more than a year after release of the company's flagship SF4400 Series gateway (see ONStor Peddles SAN Consolidation). The new product retains the scaleability of its predecessor -- up to 40,000 Tbytes of supported storage, according to company sources. However, the Bobcat comes with streamlined design and management features at roughly one-third the cost.

"What we found with the previous product was that customers loved the scaleability, but the reality is that they would like to start with something more modest and grow into [larger deployments] rather than going whole hog at $100,000," says Jon Toor, ONStor's VP of marketing.

With the Bobcat gateway, ONStor has dropped the form factor down to 1 rack unit (compared with the SF4400's 3U), reduced the number of processors, and increased the amount of shared storage on each device. The tighter design also results in a price tag of $20,000, compared with roughly $60,000 for the earlier product.

"This puts ONStor in the big leagues," says Greg Schulz, senior analyst at Evaluator Group. "They're providing enterprise functionality without enterprise pricing."The company hopes this latest iteration will tap into a wider audience that might want to test the waters with a smaller implementation. A simplified management interface also targets the SMB crowd.

However, ONStor will also have to take on products from dominant NAS vendors such as Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC).

The startup looks even more like David to its competitors' Goliath with the recent partnership of EMC and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) (see Cisco & EMC Close NAS Deal). Other pressures come from well known sources such as IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and even some more established startups such as Isilon Systems and BlueArc Corp.

The vendor is aiming to fight back by widening its reseller list. "ONStor really needs to ramp their channel," says Schulz. "The technology alone doesn't ensure success."

ONStor now claims 60 paying customers and 20 more in evaluation. So, in addition to the $45 million it has already raised in venture funding, the startup will seek another round of funding this year. Speculation also surrounds ONStor as a possible acquisition by the likes of Cisco, which might covet ONStor's storage and file virtualization capabilities (see Cisco Eyes SAN Startups).Brett Mendel, Senior Analyst, Byte and Switch Insider