Nimbus doubles the capacity of its non-volatile memory
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January 31, 2012
Memory chip maker Nimbus says it has doubled the capacity of its non-volatile memory slabs with a fault-tolerant data
vault that scales to about half a petabyte. Nimbus's new E-Class storage device follows on the coatails of its S-Class Fibre
Channel, iSCSI, InfiniBand, NFS and CIFS-access flash memory arrays, which have inline dedupe and compression features.
They provide data storage capacities from 2.3 TB to 250 TB while the E-Class runs from 10 TB to 500 TB.
Nimbus has upgraded its enterprise offering by stamping out single points of failure, and says that its E-Class series has
the smallest footprint and is the most scalable and efficient primary storage array in the industry.
The E-Class memory chips have fault-tolerant and redundant controllers with automatic and non-disruptive failover features.
Software updates to the HALO operating system can be done without stopping array operations and extra capacity can be added
on the fly.
Those features are in addition to the existing active I/O modules, hot-swap flash modules, power supplies and fans.
The product uses enterprise-grade multi-level-cell flash with a 28 percent capacity reserve and the flash is RAIDed to
levels 5, 6 or 10, with hot sparing, depending on the specific needs and the system's implementation.
Regarding the storage efficiency and performance claims, Nimbus says that there can be up to 440 TB of E-Class capacity
in a full rack, and the power draw is as low as 5 watts per Terra Byte.
The company added that up to 14 racks full of 15,000 RPM hard disk drives can be replaced by a single E-Class system in
IOPS terms, 3.2 of them by one E-Class rack in capacity terms.
The E-Class has 20 percent lower cooling cost compared to 100 TB of 15K disk drives.
Additionally, Nimbus says it has signed some new customers such eBay, and counts three of the top 10 semiconductor
companies as customers.
Nimbus has been profitable for three years. The company isn't a classic Silicon Valley startup in that it's not loaded
up with venture capital funding and is being very careful in its hiring and spending.
It has fifteen U.S. reseller channel partners, and is aiming for fifty by the end of 2012. The company says it has operations
or partners in six European countries and three Asian ones.
Nimbus is one of three flash array startups that are shipping products. The other two being WhipTail and Violin Memory.
This trio will be joined by others later this year, such as Pure Storage and SolidFire.
We're still awaiting pure flash arrays, designed from the outset as silicon storage arrays, from the mainstream array
vendors. They may come in 2013 and possibly through some acquisitions.
Nimbus has started shipping its E-Class data storage solutions. Pricing starts at $150,000 per node.
Source: Nimbus.
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