Hey, Nimbus Data. What you doin' with those 4TB flash slabs? Making a 96TB box? We KNEW it!

Nimbus Data has announced a 10-node clustered all-flash array that can store up to 96TB in a single box. The Gemini X-series all-flash arrays build on the current Gemini F-series arrays, which come in F610/F620 variants with 56/40/20 Gbit/s InfiniBand and 40/10/1 Gbit/s Ethernet, and the F410/F420 which lack InfiniBand and use …

[batfastad]

16/8/4/2 Git/sec

How do you quantify that in Olympic swimming pools? A bonkers unit of measurement even by El Reg standards!

Pedantic, moi?

[Piro]

Re: 16/8/4/2 Git/sec

Turns out, an Olympic swimming pool contains a mammoth amount of data.

By my calculations, if you were to simply describe it as literally (H20×Number of molecules in the pool), you'd need 227800000000000000000 TiB (Tebibytes).

As for the individual molecules of the other trace elements in the pool, that becomes impractical and time wasting to estimate. Of course, describing water as simply "H20" doesn't describe all the properties, so it could be argued you'd need to include a longer description per molecule, vastly increasing the dataset required!

Thankfully, this dataset would be compressed insanely efficiently, so it's not as horrifying as it initially appears!

[Duncan Macdonald]

Bandwidth starved

40Gbits/sec is 5Gbytes/sec. As a single 4TB PCIe SSD can reach 4GBytes/sec and this system at full size would have 240 such drives with an total bandwidth of almost 1TByte/sec, the interface to the host is a SEVERE bottleneck.

(Even if the Reg has misquoted and the bandwidth to the hosts is 40GBytes/sec rather than 40Gbits/sec it is still a severe degredation of the potential SSD bandwidth.)

[diodesign]

Re: Bandwidth starved

"Even if the Reg has misquoted"

Edit: Yes, it should be 40GB/s not 40Gb/s total throughput at full scale. That's been fixed. Please, please, guys, email corrections@thereg with any problems you spot. I can't read every comment for typos :(

C.

[Levente Szileszky]

Re: Bandwidth starved

That's 40GB/s, obviously, it's just a (very usual) typo, clearly. As much as I don't believe half of what Nimbus claims and even without my previous dealings with the CEO (think of a snake oil sales guy) I'd certainly never put all my data on a box where the CEO directly deals with everything, down to customer support, where staff members usually leave or laid off within a year (see El Reg reports from last year as well as Nimbus' disastrous reviews at Glassdoor) etc etc I still *DO* realize that the hardware design must be capable, that's not the issue (the issue is the shocking mismanagement and the horror stories you can hear from insiders.)

[Martin0641]

I'll Stick With This...

Skyera blows them out of the water, 20GBps compressed and deduped in capacities up to 250TB with 500TB in Q4 at 5m iops per 1u unit a single name space and 800 watts.

Mine arrives in June, the beta units we evaluated all performed above spec, and besides: using SSDs in a raid is a stupid way to handle flash memory, blocking block level access to flash by putting it being an unnecessary sata or sas interface that harms write amplification ability.

[Levente Szileszky]

Re: I'll Stick With This...

I'm not sure what unit you have tested but Skyera's upcoming SkyHawk (the one with the built-in switch in the back, with its weird 30-port gigabit option) is actually limited to 2.4GB/s, according to my recent discussions with them - their next-gen unit, SkyEagle, with that promised 20GB/s, is nowhere near to mass production, and even its first (beta) iteration will come half-baked, with only iSCSI & NFS supported, SMB3 is only slated to arrive toward the end of this year.

And no offense but I'm very doubtful you will have anything in June... for starter unless you have a paid a TON of money to participate in a non-production-grade unit's beta program - speaking of which, how much was your price tag? Since I know the real numbers getting a correct ballpark number would quickly settle the second point, namely my misgivings about your claims...

I hope Skyera will come through and indeed turns the market upside down but based on the prices I've seen I don't see it happening before a fully mature SkyEagle hits the market around this time next year (even Skyera admitted it is likely to be the real timeline for en masse shipments of fully-featured, production-quality units.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Would this be a suitable upgrade for my PS3?

[MrZoolook]

96 TB... should be about enough to install Win-8...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'll stick w this..

Saw the skyeagle at aug 2013 flash memory summit . It had 16 -16FC ports. Skyera Booth guy said only challenge was cooling. That may be why 500TB is Q4.

Do you think the FC model of skyeagle has a switch? Or just the model with iSCSI?

I would guess a big name company would get the <255 TB unit at no charge just for getting the customer's test experience.