Network-attached storage vendor ONStor and storage-area network vendor 3Par last week said they have joined forces to deliver an offering that combines the best of both of their technologies.

The new UtiliCat is a unified file- and block-level device that lets customers view their SAN and NAS from a single management interface.

"Because I am IT, as well as space-constrained, this [common management] is a true advantage of the box," says Burzin Engineer, manager of infrastructure services for online retailer Shopzilla in Los Angeles. Engineer, who has 15T bytes of UtiliCat storage, had been using BlueARC NAS and EMC Symmetrix storage, but had to manage them from two interfaces.

Both ONStor and 3Par support the box and use a common support line.

Engineer had to be convinced that the joint support scheme would work, but says he has yet to be "yo-yoed from vendor to vendor."

The UtiliCat consists of a two- to four-node cluster of ONStar Bobcat NAS gateways connected to two to eight 3Par InServ block controllers per cluster for a capacity of 2.5T to 384T bytes. As many as four to 400 file systems can be supported per cluster.

The UtiliCat has file throughput up to 960M bytes/sec and up to 2.8G bytes/sec of block throughput. It has as many as 128 Fibre Channel ports for connection to the incorporated SAN storage.

"The combination of these two next-generation NAS and SAN solutions makes them pretty competitive to leading vendors, such as Network Appliance, and to a lesser-extent EMC," says Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "There is more and more demand among customers for a converged solution."

The UtiliCat will compete mainly with Network Appliance's 980C clustered file server appliances. The 980C has eight Fibre Channel connections to the SAN and supports four file systems. It will also compete with EMC's Celerra NSX NAS gateway, which attaches to Symmetrix DMX or EMC Clariion CX systems and the IBM TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500.

A UtiliCat with 2.5T bytes of capacity starts at $175,000.