Over the past decade, while the rest of IT infrastructure has improved exponentially in performance, storage has been virtually stagnant, increasing in capacity but not in performance. The table below shows how CPU, DRAM, network, and bus performance have outpaced storage by 16 to 400 times. To have kept pace, hard drives would need to spin at 6 million rpm today. Instead, storage is now the prime bottleneck in datacenters.

2000 2005 2010 Today CPU 1 x Pentium 4 1.5 GHz 5 x Pentium D 2.6 GHz 15 x Nehalem Quad 2.6 GHz 30 x Octal 2.6 GHz DRAM 1 x DDR1 PC-2100 4 x DDR2 PC2-4200 8 x DDR3 PC3-8500 16 x DDR3 PC3-17000 Network 1 x 100Mb Ethernet 10 x Gigabit Ethernet 100 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet 400 x 40 GbE Bus 1 x PCI 32-bit/33 MHz 15 x PCIe Gen1 x8 30 x PCIe Gen2 x8 60 x PCIe Gen3 x8 Disk 1 x 15K rpm hard drive 1 x 15K rpm hard drive 1 x 15K rpm hard drive

At the same time, power, cooling, rackspace, and datacenter maintenance costs have reached record levels. According to Gartner, storage consumes 37% of overall datacenter power. Organizations face relentless data growth without the facilities or operating budget to support them. Despite achievements in areal density, disk storage remains based on power-hungry, hot, large and comparatively unreliable technology.

Caching, spindle short-stroking, and most recently primary storage tiering have emerged as possible solutions to these challenges. Unfortunately, all of these approaches have significant drawbacks.

Nimbus Sustainable Storage® provides the most intelligent and efficient solid state storage platform to enable enterprises and datacenters to solve storage performance and associated operating cost challenges. Nimbus Sustainable Storage systems, including the modular S-Class system and the cloud-scale E-Class system, represent a revolutionary departure from spinning disk arrays, delivering purpose-built all-flash storage with comprehensive unified storage management and data protection software built-in.