ONStor recently released Cougar 6000 NAS Gateway, a high-performance option to their existing Bobcat product line. Both products are NAS gateways and can attach to existing storage in the Data Center or give you the flexibility of selecting whatever new storage you would like. The other news reports on this announcement have missed the two important ramifications of this product and not explained why that is important to you the IT Professional...Storage Switzerland will.

There parts of this announcement that all the reports I have read cover well; first, the ONStor NAS Gateway is a Clustered NAS Gateway. This means that multiple NAS appliances can be connected to the same storage and can stand in for each other on a node failure. Second it has a Global File System. This allows you to transparently move folders between file systems for performance balancing or capacity optimization. Third the ONStor Operating System allows you to create virtual file servers which allows you to transparently move virtual file servers between NAS heads, similar to how you move virtual servers using VMotion in a VMware environment.

Here is the part that the news reports are missing, you can have Bobcat and Cougar heads participating in the same cluster. This means that if you have a virtual file server that needs a performance boost, you can just move it to your new Cougar NAS Head, and when the need for a performance boost is over simply move it back. 

An ideal example is you have a project that has become active and files in that project need to be accessed quickly and by a lot of users. As the storage administrator you can move the virtual file server that maintains this project on the high performance Cougar allowing users to process data rapidly, then as the project ages move it back to the Bobcat NAS Head. As the project ages further and becomes less active, leverage the Global File System to move the project from a Fibre based array to a SATA based array. 

Where this gets very interesting is if you start using NFS booted VMware images, as explained in detail in other articles, NFS is an ideal way to host storage for a VMware Infrastructure. By using NFS you can leverage the same movement  capabilities to move virtual machines based on disk I/O performance needs.

Lastly, for the first time high availability in a high performance NAS environment does not require purchasing two of the high end heads. Assuming your service levels can justify it, you could purchase one of the high performance Cougar NAS Heads for your high end processing and one of the more modestly performing Bobcats for traditional file access. If either box fails the file service could be shifted to the surviving server while the downed Head can be recovered.