The ONStor Pantera Clustered NAS system was named by Fortune 1000 IT managers as one of the industry's most exciting products in use in the TheInfoPro's Wave 8 Storage Study, Fall 2006. Introduced in August of 2006, ONStor claims Pantera has undercut pricing by 50 percent in the competitive NAS market.

Pantera answers user demand for innovative NAS solutions that deliver file virtualization capability. According to TheInfoPro's Wave 8 Storage Study, purchases of NAS of capacity, which grew 59 percent in the last year at Fortune 1000 companies, have led to a surge in file virtualization, which tops TheInfoPro's Storage Management Technology Heat Index measuring users' reported spending and implementation plans. ONStor Pantera includes both integrated server and storage virtualization, delivering single-pool storage management regardless of the capacity required. Virtualized resources enable non-disruptive growth, free of costly data migration and user disruption.

"The findings in our Wave 8 Storage Study indicate that NAS deployments have been accelerating as installed capacity in the Fortune 1000 has grown from 44 TB in Wave 4 (Fall 2004) to 224 TB in Wave 8," said Rob Stevenson, managing director for Storage at TheInfoPro. "In conjunction with this growth, file virtualization has become a top priority, supplanting ILM, as storage professionals look to decouple the relationship between the filer and the host in order to manage each independently, using file virtualization on the storage side to manage growth transparently and server virtualization on the host to increase application agility."

TheInfoPro's findings are derived from 153 hour-long interviews, conducted between July 2006 and September 2006, with TheInfoPro's TIPNetwork of the world's largest buyers and users of IT from Fortune 1000 enterprises. Users named Pantera one of the top 10 most exciting products in the industry when asked the question, "What emerging or exciting vendor product do you have in use?"

"The latest report from TheInfoPro clearly indicates the importance Fortune 1000 companies are placing on NAS solutions and file virtualization to handle the rapid growth in file storage," said Bob Miller, president and CEO of ONStor. "Cognizant of these needs, we strive to deliver affordable NAS solutions that provide the utmost in performance, scalability and flexibility as demonstrated in our recently announced Pantera systems. We are thrilled that users are excited about the product and we promise them there's more to come!"

By integrating features such as server virtualization and n-way clustering, ONStor Pantera allows customers to start with a complete configuration, and then independently grow both performance and capacity by adding either filer nodes or disk. According to the company, expansion is simple, fast, and non-disruptive. Pantera provides the capability to consolidate data from thousands of servers, and tens of thousands of users to a single storage environment.