ONStor has been selling the Bobcat Series NAS Gateway for some time. That system required users to provide their own disk storage, but the Campbell, Calif., company has been getting requests from users interested in a solution that also included the disk storage, according to Jon Toor, vice president of marketing.

Chris Ferry, director of operations for FortuneCity.com Inc., a New York web hosting provider that also produces MyPhotoAlbum.com, has been using the Pantera with SATA storage for about a week. The price of the system was half that of a comparable system from Network Appliance Inc., he said, adding that the company had a NetApp filer in 2003 that it discarded because it was cost-prohibitive. He paid less than US$100,000 for the Pantera, while "EMC and NetApp quotes were in the high $100,000 and low $200,000 range," he said.

In addition, the Pantera is scalable at a lower cost than competing products, according to Ferry. Products such as EMC Corp.'s CLARiiON series have pricing such that storage can be increased to a particular limit -- 15TB, 25TB, and so on -- and then he'd have to "inject a whole lot of cash" to get it to the next level, he said.

FortuneCity.com currently has a total of 15TB in two ONStor Pantera clusters, and any new storage it buys will be Pantera systems, Ferry said. Those clusters join two mirrored SATABeasts from Nexsan Technologies Inc. and RAID arrays from Winchester Systems Inc. for a total of 58TB of storage at the company.

Greg Schulz, an analyst at StorageIO in Stillwater, Minn., says that ONStor's offering stands out for its great enterprise functionality, which includes snapshots, clustering, virtual servers, NFS/CIFS support and management tools without the expense or complexity of traditional products. And in comparison to the existing ONStor NAS gateways, Pantera lets users deploy a scalable, turnkey NAS product at an effective price, he said.