eBay Buys 100 Terabytes of Nimbus Flash Memory

nimbus-s-class

A Nimbus Data Systems S-Class unit with Flash modules. eBay has deployed more than 100 terabytes of Nimbus systems.

eBay says it has deployed more than 100 terabytes of solid state storage systems from Nimbus Data Systems to power its VMware virtual server infrastructure. The scale of the Nimbus deployment at eBay, which started with one system and expanded to 12 systems in less than one year, makes it among the world’s largest consolidated deployments of network-attached flash storage for virtualization.

eBay chose Nimbus after evaluating its existing hard disk-based storage systems, flash-based caching solutions, and tiered storage architectures. The Nimbus solution delivered near line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet iSCSI performance to the VMware hosts while consuming 78 percent less energy and 50 percent less rackspace than conventional disk-based solutions, the company said today

Entirely Flash, not Hybrid

"Nimbus’ S-class solid state storage system delivers exceptional performance and response time that was not possible before with traditional disk-based systems," said Michael Craft, Manager, QA Systems Administration. "Most impressively, Nimbus delivered a solution based entirely on flash memory, not a hybrid approach, at a price point comparable to primary disk arrays and with no software licensing fees to boot."

Nimbus  today announced the general availability of its second generation S-Class series of flash memory storage systems. The new line, which retains the S-Class designation, is three times faster than the original launched in 2010. In addition, the new S-Class adds support for Fibre Channel and Infiniband networking natively,

"As organizations migrate from spinning disk to flash-based storage, wins like eBay demonstrate the maturity and superiority of Nimbus solutions as well as the market readiness for flash adoption in enterprise SAN and NAS environments," said Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus.

"The eBay win is a testimonial to the merits of flash in large-scale environments and a significant vote of confidence for Nimbus’ combination of network-attached flash storage with management software," said Jim Handy, Chief Analyst with Objective Analysis. "A growing number of CIOs have started to replace conventional HDD arrays with flash because of its significant performance advantage. These users are later delighted to find that the flash solution also gives them power, cooling and rackspace improvements. Since Nimbus provides both the hardware and software required in such systems, the company is well positioned to capitalize on this important shift in storage architecture."