Today Nimbus Data, one of many first corporations to enterprise into enterprise flash storage in 2003, is saying its newest era ExaDrive product. Following on from the success of the 100 TB ExaDrive DC, the corporate is releasing a brand new ExaDrive NL sequence, from 16 TB to 64 TB. This new sequence makes use of enterprise grade QLC, in comparison with TLC within the DC variant, to supply a more economical answer with endurance designed to eclipses some other QLC drive in the marketplace.
Enterprise Storage Comes in Layers
For most enterprise storage wants, tiered storage has change into the norm. For random entry workloads with excessive bandwidth necessities, NVMe storage or DRAM-like options are most popular, whereas on the opposite finish the place capability is king, massive mechanical arduous drives primarily based on SATA or SAS take middle stage, with as much as ninety 18 TB drives in a single 4U working as ‘Nearline’ storage as an information retrieval tier or chilly storage. There are plenty of corporations designing controllers, flash, new platter expertise, and all between so as to gives one thing both on the extremes of those storage wants, or to create new caching tiers within the center. The concept is to commerce off latency, bandwidth and value, for capability as we transfer up from these cumbersome spinning rust issues.
This leads us to Nimbus Data. The firm began providing flash storage options for the enterprise as early as 2003, earlier than flash storage was actually a factor – on the time the merchandise have been small however provided superb efficiency over arduous drives, and it was a number of years earlier than different corporations began producing comparable merchandise for the market. The firm has been worthwhile for years, by no means counting on any enterprise capital or seed funding, and has over 200+ prospects, together with huge names through the years akin to eBay, Paypal, and Apple. There are additionally two huge CDNs within the combine, which sadly they will’t disclose, however these are the kinds of shoppers that Nimbus Data is courting with its ExaDrive product vary.
Two years in the past, Nimbus Data showcased the ExaDrive DC, a 100 TB 3.5-inch drive designed for like-for-like swap for the 14-18 TB drives that populated a lot of the nearline storage choices in the marketplace. The downside as all the time with NAND flash is that price per TB is greater than mechanical storage, however the DC was aimed to supply a lot better density and higher energy consumption in the identical chassis. The ExaDrive DC internally has 4 separate PCBs, every with a customized flash controller with firmware written by Nimbus Data to handle the standing of the flash cells. These are grouped right into a backplane inside the three.5-inch chassis, the place an FPGA does total administration and monitoring of the drive. The drive comes with SAS 2.zero and SATA 3.zero 6 Gbps interfaces, and the dimensions of the drive mixed with the velocity of the interface implies that Nimbus Data has been providing the drive with an infinite endurance guarantee for 5 years. Writing sequential information to this drive, at round 400 MBps, would take 70 hours for context.
From LinusTechTips’ ExaDrive DC 100TB Teardown
These drives have been priced within the area of $40,000 a bit, nevertheless the purpose was to have the ability to change what might be 20U of 540+ mechanical arduous drives, round eight PB of storage, with one 4U with 9 PB. The metrics that Nimbus Data’s prospects cared about have been centered round density, higher latency, endurance (mechanical arduous drives are sometimes rated at 550 TB/yr, which is definitely a restrict on the motor, not the platter), energy per TB, and finally operational bills over the lifetime of the server (OpEx), together with rack house, energy, cooling, and upkeep. The drives have been costly for not solely being new in the marketplace, however in addition they used TLC NAND, because it was straightforward to return by on the time. Some of…
