ONStor on Monday introduced a network-attached storage system the company says reduces the entry price for customers by as much as half compared to existing storage products.

"We're making NAS economically available to a greater number of users," says Jon Toor, VP of marketing for ONStor. "This blows the doors off previous pricing levels."

The Pantera Clustered NAS lets customers start with a complete configuration priced at below $40,000, then build on both performance and capacity by adding either fiber nodes or disks to the system.

ONStor is targeting its Pantera product line at the midlevel enterprise, a portion of the market served largely by Network Appliances for NAS systems. An average enterprise NAS configuration of 12 terabytes of storage would be priced around $250,000 from NetApp, but only $99,000 from ONStor, Toor says.

The bulk of the cost reduction is possible because ONStor doesn't charge for the inclusion of the Common Internet File System or Network File System protocols used by the storage systems, he says.

The Pantera systems are available now through ONStor and its sales partners.