sauce for the SSD box gander

Nimbus enters SAS SSD controller market

• Inside an ExaDrive-powered SSD, multiple ultra-low power ASICs exclusively handle error correction, while an intelligent flash processor provides wear-leveling and capacity management in software.

• ExaDrive's software-defined architecture will enable SSDs as large as 500 TB by the year 2020.

• 40 million nearline/high-capacity HDDs are shipped per year using the 3.5" form factor... ExaDrive-powered SSDs offer 5x the capacity of nearline HDDs in the same size and power budget.

• ExaDrive supports up to 10 years of write endurance.

• Imprinting the brain of the SSD - Before 2007 - it was rare for SSD makers to say much about what their internal controllers did - or how they did it. How did the market go from - Who cares? to - You care! about the identity of SSD controllers?

• how fast can your SSD run backwards? - 11 Key Symmetries in SSD design - what they are and why you need to know.

• after AFAs - what's the next box? - This raises the question:- what proportion of the raw semiconductor memory capacity ought to be usable as storage (SSD) or usable as memory (RAM - as in "random access memory" which operates with the software like DRAM but which could be implemented by other technologies).

• What's the new business plan for Nimbus? Does selling drives replace selling systems?
  
  Tom said Nimbus will do both. He sees the high capacity SAS SSDs as a new market opportunity.
  
  In the past competitors in the SAS SSD market have focused on performance rather than capacity and cost. Due to the predicted and actual impact of 2.5" NVMe SSDs the SAS market no longer has a performance reason to be. However even "slower" SAS SSDs provide useful life extensions and new market roles for makers of SAS arrays who previously used hard drives. A lot has changed in the SAS SSD market since the first drives were announced 10 years ago. Nimbus describe how and why they see a gap in the market today (pdf).
  
  Tom said - "One of the benefits we get from having alternative market outlets for our ExaDrive platform (the new no write limits SAS SSD) is that more minds take a close look at the design and operation (these being the flash drive partners Viking and SMART Modular). This and the higher volume of drives used will result in higher quality and more reliable SSDs compared to if we had just continued using the drives as a captive design in our own arrays."

• Will the new drive business cannibalize Nimbus's array business?
  
  Tom said no.
  
  We were both on the same page about this agreeing on all the points we touched.
  
  We discussed how much more complicated the enterprise SSD arrays segments had gotten. Nimbus's drive customers can access as much of the software stack as they need.
  
  The ability for integrators to customize the array management of their SSDs has been a growing strategic shift in the market for several years. We've seen many different way of doing this.
  
  One trend has been for SSD makers to customize the controllers for their bigger cloud scale customers. But you can get better results more easily by customizing the data management using software instead - because software can intervene at multiple levels - both at the array and solo drive level. (This is an example of adaptive intelligence flow symmetry.)
  
  Nimbus uses standard flash controller IP to manage the flash (currently controllers from Hynix). Nimbus's software stack provides data management which is scalable to many petabytes in a small rack.

• How has Nimbus been affected by the memory shortages and higher memory prices?
  
  Here's the gist.
  
  The efficiency of storage arrays - how many chips it takes to deliver storage with a given quality of performance and usefulness - has always been important in array designs.
  
  For as long as memory prices were falling then suboptimal architectures could still reach customers and satisfy the business plans of the companies which sold them. (The inefficiency hits were price, profit margin. electrical power and rack space. But the new systems would still look good compared to those they replaced.)
  
  Now with constrained supplies of memory everywhere - those designs which can do more with less - have a competitive advantage.
  
  Array-aware SSD controller software, coupled with scalable fault tolerant array architecture, are how the efficiency problems are best managed.
  
  For customers of Nimbus's new SAS SSDs - the ability to use the efficiency mechanisms which come from its array level experience will mean that its customers could do more with less chips in their boxes.
  
  So the shortages will be good for the market because they will force customers to gravutate towards better designs and better software architectures.

• Is Nimbus still averse to VC funding?
  
  Tom said it wasn't exactly like that because the company did have investors. The company has followed a cautious route of aiming to be funded by its customers rather than suck in huge amounts of VC cash which impose their own timescale pressures.
  
  Nimbus owns its software stack and has been cutomizing the SSDs it uses for many years.
  
  In effect - the multi year development and evolutionary improvement of the company's array technologies are things you can do if you don't have a VC checking every part of the business against a calendar which has an IPO question hanging over every future quarter.