Thursday, August 4, 2011

Leveraging an internal 6Gb SAS architecture and an upgraded flash management processor, the Nimbus storage system produces 800K IOPS per 2U storage module, 16M IOPS per rack. With the addition of Fibre Channel and Infiniband to the existing support for iSCSI, SRP, NFS and CIFS protocols, the S-Class provides truly unified SAN and NAS provisioning in a single, high-performance storage system.

The S-Class is more than simply an array comprised of all flash storage. It’s an enterprise system which includes a full slate of storage services, including snapshots, replication, high availability, deduplication, thin provisioning and encryption, plus integration with database, email and virtualization platforms. This enables the Nimbus storage system to be used as a high performance replacement for a traditional disk array.

With its ‘from the ground-up’ design approach the S-Class arrays have hardware and software that are engineered to exploit the performance of solid state storage while maintaining NAND flash endurance and controlling costs. All three of these parameters must be addressed in order to make an all-flash storage system feasible.

Performance

The S-Class arrays now have a non-blocking internal architecture that provides 144 Gb/s to exploit the IOPS and throughput capabilities of a high capacity solid state storage system. Flash management functions, including wear leveling, trim, realtime garbage collection and over-provisioning are designed into the system and handled in ASICs, or  by the OS.

Endurance

Software is also designed around the special requirements that flash memory brings. For example, since flash cells can only support a finite number of over-writes (program/erase or P/E cycles) care must be taken by the file system and the storage OS to write only full blocks or pages of data. Nimbus’s HALO OS aligns data writes with flash pages in order to maximize each write operation and improve flash endurance.

Cost

Nimbus uses Enterprise MLC (eMLC) NAND flash devices to provide a cost-effective alternative to SLC, one which also offers the reliability and endurance needed in an enterprise storage array. These systems include deduplication, thin provisioning and data compression as well, to improve effective capacity and lower cost per GB. Nimbus storage systems include all software and file system licenses at no extra charge. Coupled with reasonable support prices, the Nimbus S-Class storage systems offer an acquisition cost per GB that’s comparable to high speed spinning disk systems. And, Nimbus calculates these costs without deduplication or thin provisioning.

Storage Swiss Take

Ever since flash began to appear in enterprise storage environments the question we’ve always asked was, “why not just make a pure flash array?”. For the right environments it could be simpler than trying to stretch a limited capacity of flash storage across larger data sets. The answer is that it really takes a purpose built system designed to support NAND flash storage to pull it off. Redesigning a traditional disk array for flash is a difficult challenge to begin with, but especially for companies also invested in the continuing success of those spinning disk products. Nimbus has pulled off this ‘hat trick’ of higher performance, longer endurance and cost containment, proving that flash really is replacing disk storage, and not just niche use cases.

Eric Slack, Senior Analyst