ONStor Looks To NAS Channel To Speed Up Content Distribution

The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company's new Bobcat 2280 is aimed at companies with a large content stores that needs to be distributed, said Jon Toor, vice president of marketing. It does not act as a Web server, but provides the conduit to go from the content to the user, he said.

That is a growing market, said Toor. "Internet streaming is doubling year over year, and the amount of bandwidth is also doubling," he said. "For instance, the PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications Systems) penetration rate in U.S. hospitals is only 5 percent. So this is a wide-open space."

The Bobcat 2280 is the result of hardware and software enhancements to the company's previous video streaming appliance, with a new accelerator chip that increases performance by 40 percent over the previous model, Toor said.

It includes Gigabit Ethernet connectors to a LAN, and a Fibre Channel connector to storage over a SAN. A second unit adds redundancy to the video streaming, said Toor. Multiple units in a cluster configuration allow clustering, with all nodes configured for active operation so that the additional units do not degrade performance, he said.

The gateway is a very channel-friendly product, Toor said. "This allows solution providers to see the storage they are already working with, but add value to that storage," he said. "They can say, 'This is better than NetApp or EMC because it works with the products you already have.'"

The Bobcat 2280 is available. List price is $59,000, or about 20 percent more than the previous model, said Toor. That price includes all the required software, and there are no capacity-based charges, he said.