Nimbus Crams Terabytes of Flash into New System

Newcomer Nimbus Data Systems certainly isn't bashful about going full force into the promising solid-state enterprise storage market.

The San Francisco-based startup, which has trademarked its products as Sustainable Storage, July 19 announced a new enterprise flash system, the S1000, that is loaded with a whopping 10TB of solid state capacity per shelf-a system scalable to 250TB within a single file system.

That's a ton of SSD-based storage. No other company is cramming that much flash into a single array.

"Our products bring orders of magnitude of improvements in power and performance," CEO Thomas Isakovich told eWEEK, "particularly in virtualization, VDI and database environments, and in the financial sector, in Web 2.0 companies, oil and gas companies-everyone across a lot of verticals has been extremely enthusiastic."

Isakovich said Nimbus has begun shipping a new update of its FlexConnect storage software across the entire S-class product line. The software enables 10GbE network controllers to perform at up to 120G bps of available bandwidth and utilize a dozen 10GbE ports-all from a single appliance, Isakovich said.

The new S1000, the next step up from the company's current S250 and S500 models, uses higher-density 34nm EMLC NAND, Isakovich said. The new array features 24 400GB, hot-swappable flash blades per shelf-which amounts to 10TB of solid state capacity.

This starter S1000 system is priced at $100,000, Isakovich said.  The S500 starts at about $35,000.

All of Nimbus' S-class systems support can scale up to 600 flash blades per single file system, for a total of 250TB, he said.

Nimbus' HALO storage operating system, standard on all of its S-class systems, provides snapshots, replication, deduplication and multiprotocol SAN and NAS functionality, Isakovich said.

"IT managers for performance-intensive enterprises are challenged to overcome the IO bottlenecks, floor space constraints and energy requirements of today's data centers," said IDC flash research manager Jeff Janukowicz. "Comprehensive designs, such as Nimbus' S-class Enterprise Flash Storage System, which delivers increased performance and high availability at far lower operational costs, are a welcome solution to these challenges."

Isakovich said that Nimbus has a number of new deployments and that a growing group of new customers are in the pipeline.