Nimbus Launches 4th Generation Flash Appliance

Nimbus Gemini Generation 4 Flash Storage ArrayNimbus has introduced its 4th generation Gemini flash array, which the company claims to be the first to use 1xnm NAND flash chips.  Along with this announcement Nimbus has reduced pricing by 35% and has increased performance from 2-4 times that of its earlier-generation products.

Using Nimbus’ HALO software the company says it can achieve a cost of $0.78 per usable gigabyte, or about 1/3rd the cost of a comparable hybrid storage array.

The Gemini array uses redundant active-active controllers and its software takes advantage of that topology to improve performance.  Latency is below 0.05ms, at 1 million write IOPS and 2 million read IOPS.

The fourth-generation Gemini is offered in two configurations:

  • F400, with eight 16Gb Fibre Channel or 10Gb/s Ethernet connections, aimed at conventional SAN and NAS applications
  • F600, with eight 56Gb/s Infiniband or 40Gb/s Ethernet connections, which is aimed at cloud providers

Both provide 3-48 terabytes in a single 2U chassis and support up to 385 terabytes of usable space with compression.

Nimbus management says that the company is doing well, with over 500 customers, 72% of whom have done repeat business with the company, with one top web company using 1.4 petabytes of Nimbus flash.