Nimbus flash system uses only 5 watts per TB

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Storage company Nimbus Data Systems unveiled its new E-Class flash memory system, a fully-redundant multiprotocol solid state storage system.

With record-setting capacity and unprecedented power, cooling and rackspace efficiency, the E-Class outperforms and costs less to operate than conventional disk arrays while providing the high-availability, scalability and cost reduction that enterprises and cloud providers demand, claims the company in a release.

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"Unveiling the E-Class is a watershed event for both Nimbus and the rapidly-growing solid state industry," stated Thomas Isakovich, founder and CEO, Nimbus Data Systems. "Customers are not satisfied with hybrid storage arrays or proprietary tiered systems that offer only modest performance gains, do not improve efficiency, and lock-in customers to one vendor for all of their storage capacity. With the Nimbus E-Class, the ultimate goal can be achieved: a best-in-class all-flash primary storage infrastructure that helps our customers leapfrog the competition in both IT performance and profitability."

Features:
Multiprotocol solid state system with no single point of failure and enterprise-grade flash.

Can support 500 TB as one logical pool.

Touted to even eclipse 15K RPM disk arrays by over 3x and consumes as little as 5 watts per TB.

Comprehensive data management software and "unified" storage without any licensing fees.

With no-single-point-of-failure, the Nimbus E-Class is ideal for applications such as enterprise-wide server virtualization, web infrastructure, database clusters, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and high-performance computing. The E-Class platform consists of a pair of redundant controllers and up to 24 solid state storage enclosures, adds the release.

Each E-Class controller supports up to four active-active IO modules including 10 Gigabit Ethernet, fibre channel, and Infiniband. Nimbus software automatically detects controller and path failures, providing non-disruptive failover. The E-Class also supports online software updates and online capacity expansion. With RAID protection and hot-swappable flash, power, and cooling modules, components can be easily replaced without downtime.

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The Nimbus E-Class can scale from 10 TB to up to 500 TB with one point of management and one unified storage pool.

It features Nimbus' third-generation enterprise flash modules, packing twice as much enterprise-grade flash memory as before. Nimbus' file system aggregates the capacity across all E-Class solid state enclosures.

From one interface, users can provision capacity using fibre channel, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, or SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol), providing unified block (SAN) and file (NAS) storage in one easy-to-use system.

All storage is thin-provisioned, maximizing utilization and simplifying storage capacity planning.

Nimbus' latest solid state storage enclosures pack 20 TB of enterprise-grade flash memory in a 2U of rackspace. This enables up to 440 TB of solid state storage in a single industry-standard rack, delivering the same capacity that would otherwise take more than three racks of 15K RPM disks.

In IOps, the E-Class delivers in one rack the equivalent of 14 racks of 15K RPM disks, the release adds. The E-Class is powered by Nimbus' HALO storage operating system, a unified SAN and NAS software stack.

The Nimbus E-Class is available, with a 10 TB dual-controller configuration starting at $149,995. The full HALO storage operating system is included in the system price.