Enterprise storage start-up claims to slash energy costs

Five-year-old Nimbus Data Systems has shipped some technology that it is describing as Sustainable Storage. The company claims that its S-class enterprise flash-based technology can reduce power usage for storage arrays by 95 percent, compared with traditional disk-based arrays.

Each Nimbus S-class system can include up to 504 NAND flash blades, along with the company's HALO storage operating system, to offer up to 100 terabytes of solid state storage. The technology supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, unified iSCSI, NFS and CIFS. Depending on the configuration, the system starts at around $25,000 for a 2.5 terabyte version.

Here are some other particulars, which might bring things home a bit more in terms of power consumption. Nimbus calculates this in a couple of ways, saying the S-class systems can deliver 6,000 IOps per watt and up to 675,000 IOps per floor tile. One shelf uses about 80 watts of power and takes of 2U of rackspace. That compares to 8 racks and considerably more power for disk-based arrays, according to Nimbus.

The company claims that about 200 sites are using its HALO storage operating system today. The S-class systems come with a five-year warranty.