Today’s Briefing - ONStor Pantera LS 2100 Series
In a recent storage blog entry on Information Week, we discussed NAS vendors tapping Ocarina Networks to add deduplication capabilities to their offering. ONStor's new Pantera LS2100 is another example of storage companies specializing on what they do best. In this case ONStor tapped SUN's open-source software ZFS. Similar to those adding deduplication functionality, this decision by ONStor to use ZFS allows companies to focus on the data management pieces of their solutions and leverage the world wide community work on the ZFS file system.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The Pantera LS 2100 is a new Unified Storage System from ONStor that can provide file services under NFS and CIFS as well as iSCSI block support. The LS 2100 is ONStor's first entrance into the mid-sized business market. ONStor's Cougar NAS Gateway and its file system, StorFS continues on as their high performance solution for more demanding file sharing workloads. Over time ONStor will integrate the unique capabilities of StorFS, like N-Way Clustering, Virtual NAS Services and its very impressive CIFS stack into the ZFS offering.
The Pantera LS 2100 series comes in two models; the 2130 and the 2150. The 2130 is scalable to 48 drives of SAS or SATA, is capable of 15k NFS Ops and has a starting list price of 36,000 with 15TB of SATA Storage. The higher end 2150 has capacity for 96 drives of SAS, SATA and SSD with a starting list prices of $39,500 with 15TB of SATA storage. At 25k NFS Ops the LS2150 is a compelling offering for all but the highest performance file sharing requirements.
The Pantera LS 2100 series may be an ideal platform for virtual server environments. With VMware and Citrix Xen, you can leverage NFS as the primary protocol for standard VM images. NFS as we discussed in our VMware Storage Protocols article deserves serious consideration when compared to iSCSI or Fibre as the storage protocol for virtual server environments. Then for areas where block storage is required iSCSI is readily available.
The significance of ZFS can not be understated. With the combination of ONStor and ZFS you have a mature company leveraging a file system that is tested by a world wide community. As is obvious by the price points this partnership has allowed ONStor to not only be very competitively priced, it should also allow them to speed the development cycle to further improve its data management capabilities.
The capabilities that ONStor gains from ZFS are numerous and something we will detail in a future full length article on ZFS. Just a few of the features include:
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•pooled storage meaning no luns, but you can carve out iSCSI luns
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•self healing storage with complete data check sums
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•continuous data protection
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•Snapshots with support for full backups, incremental backups and near instant recovery
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•asynchronous replication to a remote site
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•full NDMP support
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•automated data migration, move data from SSD to SAS to SATA and vice-versa automatically
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•simple provisioning
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•space efficient clones, writeable snapshots
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•block level data compression, transparent and user selectable for a potential 3X capacity savings
With this announcement, ONStor has given Dell and potential Dell customers something to think about. The mid-range iSCSI market seems to be alive and well.
