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| Nimbus, founded in 2006, develops
award-winning Sustainable Storage systems, the most intelligent,
efficient and
fault-tolerant
solid state storage platform engineered for server and desktop virtualization,
databases, HPC, and next-generation cloud infrastructure. |
.... |
Combining low-latency flash
memory hardware, comprehensive data management and protection software, and
highly-scalable multiprotocol storage features, Nimbus systems deliver
dramatically greater performance at a significantly lower operating cost than
conventional disk-based primary storage arrays, all at a comparable
acquisition cost.
For more information, visit www.nimbusdata.com,
See also:-
Nimbus
- mentions on StorageSearch.com
Nimbus's news page
a winter's tale
of SSD market influences
Why size matters in
SSD design architecture | |
| . |
| after AFAs
- what's next? |
| Throughout the
history of
the data storage market we've always expected the capacity of enterprise user
memory systems to be much smaller than the capacity of all the other attached
storage in the same data processing environment. But will this always be true?
...read
the article | | |
| . |
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| . |
| Who's who in SSD? - Nimbus |
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - February 2013
Nimbus Data Systems is 1 of more than
100 companies in the
rackmount SSDs
market.
when did they enter the SSD market?
Nimbus
has been shipping SSDs in its racks since
2008 -
initially as accelerator options for its HDD arrays - and since January
2009 as pure
solid state storage. The company's internal hardware architecture is what I
call "open"
- in that it is based on RAID
like arrays of 2.5"
SAS SSDs which the
company designs itself and which use
eMLC. But
Nimbus doesn't sell SAS SSDs to other SSD array companies.
The company
is also 1 of many companies in these directories / market segments:-
rackmount SSDs,
iSCSI SSDs,
FC SANs,
Infiniband SSDs and
HA SSDs.
Top
SSD Company?
Nimbus made its debut in StorageSearch.com's list of
the
top 20 SSD companies
- in the 3rd quarter
of 2011.
In the most recent time-frame -
2nd quarter of 2013
- Nimbus was ranked #10 (it has been higher).
In
January 2013 -
the company
announced
it had been shipping at the rate of over 1
petabyte of SSD
storage / month. (That was back in the days when a petabyte of SSD was
considered to be a significant quantity. Looking ahead to 2014 that's the SSD
capacity you'll find in just 2U of
Skyera rackspace.)
enterprise
Silos?
Nimbus has never appeared in the
fastest SSDs list.
In my enterprise SSD
silo categories I think Nimbus is a good fit in the fast and the high end
of fast-enough rackmount SSD roles.
architecture and IP strengths?
SSD software is a
substantive differentiating IP asset of the company. The
HALO storage OS is
integrated in all its SSD racks.
The strong factors in Nimbus's SSD
architecture are its software - which in my view benefits from the company
founder's unique experience in developing unified SAN architectural concepts
for more than a decade. And by designing its own SSDs - Nimbus is able to
tweak system architectural features - such as performance (non blocking SAS
backplane), manageability (better integration with SSD controller data),
high availability (failover routing) and cost. The flash modules are about 80%
of the hardware.
You can see more detail in the article - "another
conversation with Nimbus - PCIe SSDs and VCs" - further down this page | | |
| ... |
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In April 2008
- Nimbus announced an
SSD accelerator option in
its Breeze H-series 10GbE IP Storage (SSD ASAP). A system with
34TB of storage, and 64GB of mirrored SSD costs about $120,000.
Nimbus
carries on the torch of a network storage operating system - which under the
name "Cloudbreak" - was first developed by Nimbus's founder at
TrueSAN Networks
.
That's the kind of groundwork thinking you need to make an
SSD accelerated storage system work economically as part of a
hybrid HDD-SSD
array - while avoiding high manual setup, tuning and configuration costs.
In January
2009 - Nimbus launched its
DH200 - a 4
port 10GbE NAS - which supports upto 10TB of flash SSD storage. See also:-
rackmount SSDs.
In
April 2010
- Nimbus Data
Systems
launched
its S-class
storage system - a 2U 10GbE rackmount SSD with 24 hot swappable
internal 6Gbps SAS
flash SSD blades in an 80W power footprint offering 5TB protected capacity for
$39,995. Powered by Nimbus' HALO storage OS the systems support
iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS
protocols and provide inline
deduplication
(typically 10 to 1), continuous local and remote replication capability
in-the-box at no additional cost. Data protection inside the box ensures that no
data is lost even with 2 simultaneous blade faults. ...read my discussion
with Nimbus's CEO
InJuly 2010 -
Nimbus Data Systems-
announced
higher
density in its 10 GbE rackmount SSD systems - 10TB (enterprise MLC)
in 2U - implemented as 24 x 400GB hot-swappable
SAS flash blades. The
company also announced improved connectivity - upto 120Gbps - from its internal
12 port FlexConnect 'virtual switch' which makes all storage available to all
ports without the need to create and assign volumes to specific ports. Pricing
for a 10TB system with FlexConnect is just under $110k.
In February 2011
-
Nimbus Data Systems
announced that it
achieved
profitability in its fiscal year ending December 31, 2010.
"Today's
announcement of achieving profitability marks Nimbus' maturity from an
innovative startup to an established storage player intent on achieving rapid
market expansion, unmatched innovation, and leadership in the emerging
sustainable storage and flash memory storage market," stated Thomas Isakovich,
CEO and founder of Nimbus. "Our commitment to customer satisfaction and
responsible growth reflects in this important company milestone."
In
August 2011
- Nimbus Data Systems
announced that eBay has deployed more than 100 terabytes of Nimbus S-Class flash
memory to power its VMware virtual server infrastructure. The Nimbus solution
delivered near line-rate 10 Gbps iSCSI performance to the VMware hosts while
consuming 78% less energy and 50% less rackspace than
conventional disk-based
solutions.
Nimbus also announced added
InfiniBand and
FC SAN support to its
pre-existing interface options.
In October 2011 -
Nimbus entered StorageSearch.com's quarterly list of the
top 20 SSD companies
for the first time - coming in at #16 for Q3 2011.
In January 2012 -
Nimbus
announced
its entry into the
high availability
enterprise SSD market with the uveiling of the company's -
E-Class systems -
which are 2U rackmount SSDs with 10TB
eMLC per U of
usable capacity and no single point of failure. Interface support includes
unified 10GbE,
FC, and
Infiniband. Pricing
starts at $150K approx for a 10TB dual configuration system.
In March 2013
- Nimbus Data
Systems
announced
new software APIs which support its proprietary
HALO OS based family
of rackmount SSDs
- and report on hundreds of real-time and historical metrics such as:-
flash endurance, capacity utilization, latency, power consumption, deduplication
rates, and overall system health. Another new feature is health monitoring
apps which run on Android / Apple phones and tablets. | |
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| who are
Nimbus's hottest competitors? - are you sure about that... |
Editor:- August 23, 2012 - SSD companies often
misidentify (in my view) who their most serious sustainable competitors really
are - as predicted by which
enterprise SSD apps silos
they satisfy best.
I was discussing this recently with Thomas Isakovich,
CEO of Nimbus Data
Systems and Scott Kline ,
Director of Corporate Communications as they were getting ready to
launch a
new fast SSD rackmount system (which they earlier this week.)
What I
was most interested in - was the companies they had named as key competitors.
For
the record - Nimbus's list included:-
Violin Memory,
Texas Memory Systems,
Pure Storage and
SolidFire. And the
idea behind the document was to suggest that the new system from Nimbus (called
the Gemini ) is at
least as good or better than the competition - based on what was being compared.
It
was clear to me that a lot of effort had gone into preparing their briefing
document - showing things like comparative capacity per U, price per TB, IOPS,
latency and that sort of thing. And I told them I enjoy reading these things -
because they are the closest I get to reading SSD articles (or joined up writing
about the SSD market) which someone else has written.
I said - "There
are 2 companies in there which I wouldn't have had on the list at all - and at
least one other that I would have added instead.
Now I knew I had
their attention. I always try to divert from any preordained script about the
SSD market - because that's what makes these conversations interesting.
"And
how did you decide which competitors to put on the list?" - I asked.
"We
put companies on this list based on those mentioned as competitors by customers"
they said.
"Well" I said "that explains it. Most
end-users often aren't clear enough in their own undertanding of what they need
- and many SSD vendors aren't focused enough yet to know which business they
should go for and which they shouldn't waste time on. But just because you butt
up against a bunch of companies doesn't mean to say they are your most serious
long term competitors."
"Who would you take out of the list?"
Tom asked "and why?"
I said
Pure Storage -
because they aren't in the same performance class as you (Pure is fast-enough -
whereas Nimbus is fast). And I'd have left SolidFire out of the comparison table
too.
Another - even better reason not to have them in your comparison
list - I said - is that Nimbus has from time to time appeared in the
Top SSD companies list
- whereas Pure Storage and SolidFire haven't. It's less important to worry
about competitors with much lower ratings and concentrate on what you can do
about competitors who are already scoring better than you in the minds of the
market.
Obviously Nimbus wasn't going to argue with me about that
angle.
"OK" Tom said - "who would you put in the list
instead?"
"Fusion-io" - I
said. "Because their new ION
software is a significant product capability which intersects with the set
of paramaters you've shown in your competitive rankings. The cost and
performance of FIO ION based systems will be an important factor in the fast
rackmount SSD market."
My thinking about this is that while it's
unlikely that many end users would realistically look at an SSD rack from
Nimbus and Fusion-io based technology as viable suppliers for exactly the same
application slot - there would be a small number of high volume end users who
would be perfectly happy with the ION based solution and would wrap their own
cloud-like fault tolerant wrappers around it - if they thought it would give
them a significant cost saving compared to the built in HA/FT in the Nimbus
product.
And because Fusion-io may already be in use in servers within
a customer site - that meant that a starting point for competitive comparisons
in rack based SSDs would often be FIO based - even if it wasn't an exact
functional fit.
Nimbus said they have supplied their rack SSDs into
customers who were using Fusion-io cards in servers.
I said
I wasn't surprised
because there are some apps where that would be the best thing for the customer
to do. (I'll be returning to the subject of boundary conditions in the
enterprise SSD market in my September blog.)
Another thing I asked
Nimbus was - do they support
adaptive DSP?
Nimbus said no.
I said - that's another thing which is going
to impact the cost per
TB in enterprise SSD racks - so I didn't think that the cost leadership they
were showing in their tables would last for long. (That was before the recent
launch by Skyera BTW
- which is another company to add to the compete-with list.)
OK - so
apart from chatting about the SSD market - what did I learn about Nimbus's new
SSD?
As I said to Tom and Scott - what's interesting is that if you
assemble a list of leading competitively priced fast SSD racks - then you
can get very similar performance, pricing and capacity density from systems
which have very different internal architectures.
- proprietary:- TMS, Violin
- open (array of PCIe SSDs) - Fusion-io
- open (array of SAS SSDs) - Nimbus
Customers with different risk
profiles (roadmap
symmetry) and prefences about the granularity of how they replace SSDs (is
it the module or rack level? - it's less risky pulling out 2.5" SSDs than
conventional PCIe SSD cards for example) will lean towards one type of supplier
rather than another.
For the same reason - most enterprise SSD users
will wait several quarters to see how reliable Skyera's new systems are in
somebody else's environment rather than risk being early adopters - even
Skyera does have the lowest price in the industry.
3 factors in the
Nimbus racks which I should mention here - and which I haven't written about
before are:-
- internally the array has point to point connections to every SAS drive.
That's a factor in throughput performance and latency.
- the Nimbus product allows non-disruptive software updates.
- Nimbus use high level software in their OS as part of the endurance
management. Overall their rack supports 50x full capacity writes each day for 5
years. (That's a good figure which compares with adaptive DSP - although Nimbus
is doing this a different way using
RAM cache in
each of their flash SSDs.)
| | |
| . |
new thinking in
rackmount SSDs
what do
enterprise SSD users want?
Ratios of SSD capacity -
server vs SAN
The
big market impact of SSD dark matter
Can you tell me the best
way to SSD Street?
|
. |
| another
conversation with Nimbus - PCIe SSDs and VCs |
Editor:- February 2, 2012 - I had an interesting
discussion yesterday with Thomas Isakovich,
CEO and founder of Nimbus
which recently launched its first high availability SAN SSDs.
To be
sure - HA
enterprise SSDs is an "up-for-grabs" SSD growth segment so that
is interesting in itself - but I told Nimbus's Marcomms Director, Scott Kline -
in advance of the call that I would be much more interested in having a
general update about how Nimbus sees itself in the SSD market - than simply
having a CEO voice-over of their new SSD rack's bullet points -
particularly as Nimbus said it was profitable (unlike some other well known
enterprise SSD companies).
a long view
In the minutes
leading up to my call with Tom Isakovich yesterday I looked up his email
address (which I always do just in case the phone fails to connect) and I
reread some earlier exchanges we had going all the way back to when he
was in his previous
company in 1999.
It got me thinking - this is someone who
takes a long term view of where enterprise storage is going. It occurred to me
that if I were to publish some of Tom's views and predictions from more than a
decade ago - they would still stand the test of time as sound bites today.
a
profitable enterprise SSD company
Tom told me Nimbus is
profitable and debt free. As a private company they don't disclose revenue. But
revenue last year was 5x the year before.
VCs IPOs and
acquisitions
Tom said because they don't have
VCs involved they have
more freedom to pursue product development and business development strategies.
Currently that would be via organic growth. So it looks to me that unlike VC
backed loss making SSD competitors - they don't need to steer in the IPO or
wannabe acquired lane.
SAS SSD arrays latency vs PCIe SSDs
I
aked if they had any plans to support
PCIe SSDs (or
2.5" PCIe SSDs)
with their virtualization software - because I guessed they could do it - if
they saw a market opportunity for it.
Tom said - no. Nimbus is
sticking with network storage boxes based around removable SAS SSDs. He could
see no advantages for them to start integrating PCIe SSDs.
When I asked
about latency - Tom said that in one customer evaluation - a Nimbus system
with an Infiniband connection delivered better latency than a PCIe SSD
competitor with an IB router. So in the rackmount SAN SSD space where Nimbus
was focused - PCIe SSDs didn't offer anything for him that he couldn't do with
SAS.
Inside server racks - he agreed - users would use a lot of PCIe
SSDs - just as HDD SANs didn't replace the need for server DAS.
where
is the core of Nimbus's SSD IP?
As I expected - Tom said - it's
mostly in their software - which can manage half a petabyte of SSD in a single
unified file system.
I knew from earlier conversations that Nimbus
design their own SAS SSD modules - but I wasn't sure - apart from cost
advantages and lowering the risk of
firmware shocks -
just how important their hardware IP was. Tom said that their earlier
non-blocking mid plane technology was a factor in performance - but their
new seamless HA failover architecture couldn't be done so well with commercial
off the shelf (COTS) SSDs.
watts and Petabyte SSDs
Tom
said that big data SSD enterprise customers (like eBay - which uses Nimbus SSDs)
look beyond price/performance to assess running costs and density - and he
said he thought that Nimbus's SSDs (TB /U and W/TB) are leading the market
in those respects.
I said that competitors like
Texas Memory Systems
and Violin - would be
sure to disagree on many of the "best" claims in their press release
documents but Tom said that for many users Nimbus's HALO software would be
the deciding factor.
I ended by saying that in 2012 - enterprise
SSD makers with reliable market proven products - would see customer demand
growing on a scale they had never seen before - and as my stats tell me that
many of you readers are interested in learning more about Nimbus - I'll be
updating my profile for them more often.
See later:- what did happen in
2012? - key SSD market transitions, followed by
2013
SSD market changes | | |
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..... |
| More interesting for me
was the "aha! moment"- when it became clear that it was indeed Nimbus
whose SSD controllers were at the heart of 2 recent high capacity SAS SSD
products from Viking and SMART Modular. |
| Nimbus enters SAS
SSD controller market (August 2017) | | |
| .. |
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| .. |
| Nimbus
awarded patent for non blocking technology |
Editor:- December 21, 2016 - Nimbus Data Systems
today
announced
it has been granted a patent -
9,268,501 - for the
non-blocking data fabric architecture which is used in its
petabyte scale SSD
racks.
"Conventional
HDD-centric
architectures employed by the majority of all-flash array vendors trap flash
performance behind legacy shared bus and scale-up designs," said Thomas Isakovich,
CEO and Founder. "Now patented, Nimbus Data's Parallel Memory Architecture
overcomes the limitations of generic off-the-shelf servers, capturing the full
performance potential of all-flash technology."
Editor's
comments:- Nimbus's patent relates to a non blocking
SAS-aware fabric
technology.
Other notable SSD box makers which have gone on the
record to talk about their non blocking matrix switch arrangements to reduce
latency and improved throughput include
Texas Memory
Systems (now IBM's flashsystem) and
Violin Memory (VXM). | | |
| ... |
| Nimbus
re-emerges from stealth with 1PB / U raw HA SSD |
Editor:- August 9, 2016 - Nimbus Data Systems has
emerged from its self imposed exit into
marcomms stealth
mode with the
announcement
of a new range of Ethernet/FC/Infiniband attached rackmount SSDs based
on its new
ExaFlash
OS with GA in Q4 2016.
Entry level products start in a 2U box with
50TB raw capacity for under $50K and for larger configurations Nimbus says its
ExaFlash offers an effective price point as low as
$0.19 per
effective gigabyte (including all software and hardware).
Higher
density boxes in this product line - D-series models - will have 4.5 PB raw
capacity in 4U (12 PB effective).
Re the
architecture
- I haven't seen details - Nimbus says there is no data network between the
storage arrays themselves, guaranteeing that performance truly scales in
lock-step with capacity and with consistent latency.
video above shows the 4PB raw ExaFlash
at FMS
Editor's comments:- if there are to be sustainable
roles in the future
consolidated
enterprise SSD systems market for AFA vendors which previously sold arrays
of SAS/SATA SSDs - and who don't own their own semiconductor fabs - the only
viable ways to establish such platform brand identities are with SSD
software and architecture.
There's a huge gap between the technological
aspiration which Nimbus talks about and the weakness of its past marketing and
the kind of
funding which we've
seen competitors in this market burn through in the past with mixed results.
In the next few quarters I hope we'll hear more from Nimbus about its
business development plans and customer adoption.
See also:-
roadmap to the
Petabyte SSD,
the unreal
positioning of many flash array "startups" | | |
| .. |
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| .. |
| Pure Storage's funding
coffers fattened up to nearly $0.5 billion |
Editor:- April 23, 2014 - Pure Storage
today
announced
it had raised another $225 million in funding - bringing the total in all
rounds to $470 million.
Editor's comments:- One of Pure
Storage's many competitors - Nimbus
- whose CEO has taken a different approach to funding (so far) - this week
published an unflattering
side by side features comparison between the 2 company's flagship rackmount
SSDs. | | |
| .. |
| Among the SSD vendors
listed in DCIG's report - the happiest will be Nimbus (who have been crowing
today about being #1). |
Editor:- March 31, 2014 - If you're interested
in
rackmount SSDs
then DCIG has published the
DCIG
2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer's Guide (free sign-up page) -
which provides detailed comments on the strengths and weaknesses of rackmount
SSD systems from 20 different vendors - which are currently available in the
market today (includes list prices).
DCIG have created their own
multi-dimensional scoring system in which they look at component features such
as density (TB/U), software compatibility (for example ease of integration with
VMware), and management functions (dedupe, tiering, snapshots etc). DCIG has
ranked these systems overall - and compared many of them to others in the same
price band. Another useful feature of the report is a background story about the
design heritage or market history of each product.
Editor's
comments:- I've read the report and think it's a good read with respect to
the raw data and detailed observations about many of the systems listed.
As
to the product rankings?
I think whether you agree or not -
depends on whether you would assign the same weights to each constituent in the
confidential matrix of factors which DCIG have devised.
For some
users it will reflect your own priorities - for others - the scoring outcome
would be entirely different.
Among the SSD vendors listed in the
report - the happiest will be
Nimbus (who have been
crowing today
about being #1) - and happy too should be
HP (which is #2).
Some
vendors - whose products are best in class in a particular dimension - don't
score highly in the main list because they lose out on the "sum of all
things which DCIG think you might need" - which is an
application dependent
judgement - rather than being a universal "goodness" attribute.
The
only company which is conspicuously absent from DCIG's list (at any rank)
is
Fusion-io. Does DCIG
know something we don't? That's very odd. Related articles:-
| | |
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| Nimbus IPO date? - this
may be the leading indicator to watch out for |
Editor:- October 1, 2013 - I was talking recently
to Tom
Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus Data Systems...
I asked Tom if he thought the air of uncertainty hanging around
competitors in the
SSD systems market
was affecting the competitive situation for his own company. In particular
I raised the subject of Whiptail's
announced acquisition by Cisco
(would the products still be available? or would some get dropped - like when
IBM acquired
TMS). The ticker ride
for VMEM was still a week into the future when we spoke but anyone who had
read Violin's IPO
disclosures could see their predicament.
He said Nimbus rarely
encounters those other SSD companies as competitors in customer sites - so he
didn't expect to see any short term impact either way. Tom views his real
competitors as being the big traditional storage companies and so when Nimbus
gets an order from a customer who has been using big name storage - he regards
that as being far more significant than beating another SSD systems "startup"
- because Nimbus is competing against prevailing customer inertia.
He
also said that apart from any technical differences between Nimbus and Violin
(he thinks Nimbus's software stack is better) - the other difference is that
Violin hasn't been profitable and its revenue growth rate has been
unreliable.
In contrast to many other SSD companies at the present time
- he said:-
- Nimbus is profitable,
- their sales have tripled this year and
- he expects sales to triple again next year
Being funded by
customers - like a traditional business - means there's no urgency to rush to an
IPO. Tom said the likeliest date he could envisage for an IPO would be
towards the end of 2014.
We moved onto the subject of
why enterprise
customers buy SSD arrays - and we traded stories about some of the
explanations which get tossed around like
IOPS per dollar -
which when you scrutinize them in any detail are ridiculous. We've both seen
leading edge silicon SSD companies put nonsensical graphs into their marketing
presentations which don't lead you anywhere useful in the real world if you
follow the superficial analysis. (That's because these vendors don't make
systems - and are many steps removed from genuine enterprise thinking.)
Tom
said most of his customers couldn't tell you how many
IOPS their
apps were demanding.
I said I've been writing about the "cost
of satisfying a given number of virtual users for a particular type of app"
as being a useful comparison figure (for storage). We both agreed that even if
enterprises don't know for sure what their throughputs or IOPS are - they have a
good idea of how many users they're trying to serve within their organization or
at customer facing web interfaces. The payroll tells you one, the marketing
people can tell you the other. And accounting can tell you how much it all
costs. You don't need storage
analyzer tools to get a feeling for where the ground level lies.
After
we had been talking for about 40 minutes I said - what was it you originally
wanted to talk to me about? - because I knew this conversation had been set up
to coincide with some sort of announcement - but I hadn't seen any details yet.
Tom said he knows that after talking to me for over 10 years I rarely look at
any briefing documents in advance and when I do I never stick to any planned
presentation agenda - so he hadn't sent me anything.
But as our
conversation had already veered towards the subject of a simple way that users
can compare the costs of SSD storage for particular types of apps - and as I'd
asked the question - he said there was a benchmark called IOmark-VDI which
Nimbus had participated in recently with the
Evaluator Group.
He said he went into the process because he thought it might be a good thing to
try out - and was gratified to found out that it shows the Nimbus product in a
very good light with a
cost
under $40 per virtual desktop (pdf) achieved by a 2U Nimbus system
supporting up to 4,032 linked clone VDI images. So that was a good note to end
on.
Now - if any of you have seen
Tom's SSD blogs -
then you'll know that he's been averaging somewhere between one and two a
year. And a few minutes after our conversation had ended - and while
pondering these various matters I thought of a good way to summarize things.
So I sent Tom this email - "when I see you updating your blog
on a weekly basis I'll know that your IPO date is impending." | | |
| . |
| Nimbus brings flash SMART
plus stats to SSD rackmounts |
Editor:- March 25, 2013 - Nimbus Data Systems
today announced
new software APIs which support its proprietary
HALO OS based family
of rackmount SSDs
- and report on hundreds of real-time and historical metrics such as:-
flash endurance, capacity utilization, latency, power consumption, deduplication
rates, and overall system health.
Another new feature is that sys
admins can monitor their
Nimbus SSD arrays
via new apps on Android / Apple phones and tablets.
Thomas Isakovich,
CEO and founder of Nimbus said the new software framework would enable cloud
architects and enterprise customers to gain greater insight into their flash
storage by viewing internal aspects of their flash storage which mattered to
them - rather than simply relying on benchmark indicators which have been
cherry picked by vendors or reviewers | | |
| .. |
|
|
| ..... |
| "Although we can
hearken back to a simpler time when the SSD market was smaller and all the top
players in it were private companies - which in fact isn't that long ago - one
of the new realities of the SSD market is that there's nearly as much interest
in SSDs as $$Ds (lucrative investment vehicles) as in SSDs as business improving
technologies." |
| anticipating -
this week's big story - in SSD news | | |
| ... |
|
|
| ... |
| Nimbus does
that "no spof SSD" thing |
Editor:- January 31, 2012 - Nimbus Data Systems
today
announced
its entry into the
high availability
enterprise SSD market with the uveiling of the company's -
E-Class systems -
which are 2U rackmount SSDs with 10TB
eMLC per U of
usable capacity and no single point of failure. Unified interface
support includes 10GbE,
FC, and
Infiniband.
Nimbus
software (which supports upto 0.5
petabytes in a
single SSD file system) automatically detects controller and path failures,
providing non-disruptive failover. The E-Class also supports online software
updates and online capacity expansion. It has
RAID protection and
hot-swappable flash, power, and cooling modules. Pricing starts at $150K approx
for a 10TB dual configuration system.
Editor's comments:-
Nimbus seemed incredulous at my immediate reaction to the preliminary info they
sent me. I said I knew of competing shipping SSDs which were denser, faster
and offered more HA features too. |
 |
But that's not to understate
the value of what the company does. Instead of being impressed by a bunch of
me-too technical metricals I was rather more impressed to learn that Nimbus
is still profitable. | | | |
| . |
| "Suippose you
sell an SSD system to a customer - let's say a low cost
MLC SSD for
video streaming - you can't be sure that later on they might not redeploy that
same system into a different application - with higher write IOPS...." |
| ...why Nimbus prefers eMLC - from
the CEO interview
April 26, 2010. | | |
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