Nimbus enterprise flash storage promises lower energy costs

Storage technology provider Nimbus Data Systems has come out with its latest enterprise flash storage system, which can provide up to 10 terabytes per shelf or up to 250 terabytes in a single file system. Nimbus claims that its platform carries 90 percent lower energy, cooling and rackspace costs than traditional 15,000-rpm disk arrays that would normally be used for high-performance computing applications. The complete press release details all the specs that you would want to know.

The release carries this quote from Jeff Janukowicz, a research manager for IDC.

"IT managers for performance-intensive enterprises are challenged to overcome the IO bottlenecks, floor space constraints and energy requirements of today's datacenters. Comprehensive designs, such as Nimbus Data Systems' S-class Enterprise Flash Storage System, that delivers increased performance and high availability at far lower operational costs, are a welcome solution to these challenges."

The company also has updated its FlexConnect technology; its product is a "virtual switch" that supports up to 12 x 10 gigabit Ethernet ports. Each port can run iSCSI, CIFS and NFS simultaneously. This appliance is Nimbus play in the whole converged networking discussion.

As you might imagine, the company is targeting some pretty heavy-duty applications with both of these products. The intended applications included high-performance computing applications such as data mining or data warehousing, seismic data processing or medical imaging. Service providers with aspirations in cloud infrastructure are also a target.

Here's Nimbus founder and CEO Thomas Isakovich's pitch about "sustainable storage" which is the company's big marketing differentiation:

A 10-terabyte model of the Nimbus S1000, including a full license of the HALO storage operating system, starts at $99,995. The FlexConnect technology (for either optical fibre or copper) can be added starting at $9,995.