Analysis

posted on 03 April 2008 09:00

A company called Nimbus Data Systems has unveiled a storage box that virtualises storage from SSD, SAS and SATA drives into one protected pool and makes it available in file or block form at speeds faster than clustered iSCSI SAN boxes, and for less money too. What is not to like about this?

Suppliers of unified storage products, ones that combine file and block storage, like Reldata, have not had an easy time of it. Customers are not beating a path to their door, or company website, saying: "Give me one box so I can dump all those separate file and block storage boxes."

Nimbus' pitch is that one box and one network can do it all, and with one management interface, for less money, faster, and using less energy than separate boxes.

Its H-series or Breeze Hybrid can have SSD, SAS or SATA drives - in one enclosure - and its HALO o/s virtualises them into a single storage pool. Access is via CIFS/NFS for files or iSCSI for blocks over 10 gigabit Ethernet and, indeed, there is one management pane of glass. There are virtual storage tiers and configurable RAID levels plus snapshots, virtual clones, synchronous mirroring and asynchronous replication all included in the base HALO o/s license.

The company says it can reduce scaling out costs by 50 percent and licensing costs by 40 percent compared to clustered iSCSI arrays, meaning LeftHand Networks and Dell/EqualLogic. It says 10gigE has 2.5 times the throughput and 75 percent lower cost than 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel.

Unifed storage is nothing new, not really. We have all had experience of it, and it's called direct-access storage (DAS). The thing of it is, is that re-unifying seperated file and block storage is darn near practically impossible. Such a migration could be terrifying.

But these Nimbus and Reldata boxes promise extraordinary simplification. Why isn't the idea taking off? Maybe it's the Esperanto thing; stop talking different languages and converge on Esperanto. That's a dead duck and isn't flying.

Perhaps the way to treat the Nimbus and Reldata boxes is to say they should be a definite port of call and inspection if you are branching out from DAS into networked storage for the first time. It's more a way of avoiding complexity than ripping out existing complexity and replacing it with one box that does it all.

As a reassurance we can note that Nimbus has 10,000 world-wide installations of its MySAN software and the company says it's the most popular iSCSI target for Windows servers. That's a good track record. Have a look at the Nimbus Breeze Hybrid. If it does what it says it does on the tin then maybe it's going to be worthwhile for you.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}