Sustainable Storage

The Future of Enterprise and Datacenter Primary Storage March 26, 2012

About Us

Sustainable Storage
Memory-based multiprotocol storage systems for virtualization, databases, HPC, and cloud infrastructure

Our Market $12 billion primary storage market

95% of revenue is in 15K/10K rpm disk arrays Rapid shift to solid state for all primary storage Dramatic performance gains, major OpEx reduction

The Performance Problem

2000 2005 2012

CPUs
DRAM Networks PCIe Bus Hard Drives
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1x
Pentium 4 1.5 GHz

5x
Pentium D 2.6 GHz

30 x
Romley Octal 2.4 GHz

1x
2.1 GB/s DDR1 PC-2100

4x
8.4 GB/s DDR2 PC2-4200

14 x
25.6 GB/s DDR3 PC3-8500

1x
100Mb Ethernet

10 x
Gigabit Ethernet

400 x
40 Gigabit Ethernet

1x
133 MB/s PCI 32/33 MHz

15 x
2000 MB/s PCIe Gen1 x8

48 x
6400 MB/s PCIe Gen3 x8

1x
3.8 ms seek Cheetah 15K.2

1.2 x
3.6 ms seek Cheetah 15K.4

1.2 x
3.6 ms seek Cheetah 15K.7

Disk 14-400x behind!

The Power Problem Escalating datacenter OpEx

37% of power, cooling, and rackspace is data storage

Company Overview Leader in Sustainable Storage

First and only unified solid state storage platform Most scalable, most efficient solid state storage system Comprehensive software for total storage management

Accomplishments

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Founded 2006 (privately-held) Profitable since 2009 200+ customers 3-time Product of the Year 3-time Top 10 storage startup

Sustainable Storage Platforms

E-Class (enterprise & efficiency) S-Class (speed & simplicity)

10 - 500 TB (10 TB per U) Distributed Cache Architecture No single-point-of-failure, live SW updates Up to 800,000 IOps and 8.0 GB/sec

2.5 - 100 TB (5 TB per U) Parallel Performance Architecture All-in-one system, 20 minute deployment Up to 800,000 IOps and 8.0 GB/sec

40/10/1GbE, 8/4Gb FC, FDR/QDR Infiniband

EMLC flash (30,000 PE cycles) w/28% reserve
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40/10/1GbE, 8/4Gb FC, FDR/QDR Infiniband

EMLC flash (30,000 PE cycles) w/28% reserve

Parallel Performance Architecture

Issue: Typical storage enclosures are for HDDs
SAS expander used to fan-out 4 lanes of SAS to 24 drive slots Run simultaneously, each drive can only run at 1/6th of its speed

Limitations of typical storage enclosures

SAS expander is a bottleneck since all IO runs through one chip Performance is capped at 24 Gbps (4 lanes of 6G SAS) Additional hop in IO path adds latency and increases contention

Solution: Non-blocking expander-less architecture

6 times more bandwidth: 144 Gbps instead of 24 Gbps Eliminates latency and congestion for vastly better performance Nimbus is 4-16x faster than off-the-shelf rivals
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Distributed Cache Architecture

Issue: Conventional write caching is for HDDs
Controller-resident with NVRAM or DRAM with external UPS Cache must be mirrored in real-time to 2nd controller for coherency

Risks with traditional designs

Mirroring link must be very fast (single point of failure, bottleneck) Failure of link disrupts cache coherency and can cause data loss Cache amount does not scale linearly to match capacity increase

Solution: Distribute cache and scale it with capacity

Caching performed at flash module level, not controller No cache coherency requirement = no single point of failure Adds write cache as capacity is expanded for linear speed gains
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HALO Storage Operating System

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HALO Core Features

Flash-aligned File System
Aligns write IO to page size of flash silicon, enhancing endurance Scalable up to 4 exabytes (EB), compared to 16 TB w/most arrays Integrated RAID protection (5, 6, 10, 0)

Unified Storage
SAN: iSCSI, Fibre Channel NAS: NFS (v2/3/4), CIFS (SMB1, SMB2) Server-attached: SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol) Direct-attached or Network-attached

All-inclusive Software
No per-feature licensing fees
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HALO Data Efficiency

Thin-provisioning
Fully thin-provisioned with space reclamation using T10 standards Maximizes efficiency through real-time block allocation Maximizes storage utilization and minimizes administration

Deduplication
Stores only unique data, reducing capacity needs Superior hash algorithm eliminates collisions Up to 20:1 data reduction in real-time

Multipathing
Supports industry-standard ALUA protocol No host-based filter driver or agent necessary
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HALO Data Protection

Snapshots
High-performance, writable snapshots Space-efficient and instantaneous Schedulable with retention policies

Replication
Continuous, always-on for superior data protection Asynchronous IO for zero local performance impact Bandwidth throttling and automatic recovery on link failures

Data Security
AES-512 (FIPS-compliant) encryption Instant secure erase of flash modules
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Easy Administration
Full CLI
Fully documented and scriptable

Application Integration
VMware ESX/vSphere and Citrix XenServer/Desktop support VAAI support (vSphere 5 and later) Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint-aware VSS provider available (beta) Oracle 11g/RAC/ASM support

Web/Mobile Management
Web-based GUI iPad interface (coming soon)
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Acquisition Cost
15K RPM Array Nimbus

Hardware Capacity Overhead Software Licenses 1st Year Support

$6.00 $3.00 $3.00 $2.00

$10.00 $2.00 $0.00 $1.00

Total Cost/GB

$14.00
Flash Wins!

$13.00

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* Pricing reference data available upon request

Effective Cost
Others Nimbus

Hardware 5:1 Dedupe 10:1 Dedupe

$25.00 $5.00 $2.50

$10.00 $2.00 $1.00

Nimbus Wins!

Reality check
NetApp dedupe survey: 32% typical savings Unrealistic to compare dedupe vs non-dedupe but if you want to, Nimbus still wins
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15K RPM Arrays vs. Nimbus

15K RPM Array IOps (4K avg) 20,000 Nimbus 800,000

MBps (256K avg)

Latency (avg) Power (kWh, 10TB, 5 yrs) Cooling (BTU, 10TB, 5 yrs) Rackspace (10TB) Acquisition Cost (10TB) 5 Year Support
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500
15 ms 13,140 44,834 4U $143,360 $81,920

8,000
< 0.2 ms 2,190 7,472 1U $133,120 $40,960
Flash Wins!

Target Applications Primary storage use cases

Enterprise-wide virtualization Database clusters VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) eDiscovery, analytics, and big data HPC: Geophysical, life sciences, multimedia

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Industry-leading Customers Recent Wins

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Top 3 virtualization software provider Top 3 news/digital information provider Top 3 post-production technology provider 3 of the 10 largest semiconductor companies Top 3 provider of online freight management Major US Dept of Defense field deployment Top 3 supercomputing center Top 5 provider of electrical power systems Leader in financial portfolio optimization

Case Study Goals

Accelerate VM creation Several PB already installed VMware ESX, 1000s of hosts Considered caching/tiering offerings

Nimbus Wins

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Reduced provisioning time from 40 to 3 minutes Cut power usage 78% Reduced rackspace needs by 65% Comparable acquisition cost to 15K RPM disk

Go-to-market Domestic Channels

FlashPoint Partner Program Storage value-added resellers 15 partners now, expanding to 50 per end of 2012

International Distribution
Currently in UK, Netherlands, France, Nordics, and Japan

Excellent support
24 x 7 x 365 technical support Worldwide parts depots
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Questions?
Nimbus Data Systems USA 701 Gateway Blvd, Suite 100 South San Francisco, CA 94080 www.nimbusdata.com (877) 6 - NIMBUS

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