Monday was quite an eventful day for flash arrays.  Aside from Violin Memory announcing its new flash array on Monday, Nimbus Data Systems, Inc., the leading provider of unified all-flash storage systems for enterprise and cloud infrastructure, also announced its fourth-generation all-flash arrays: the Gemini F400 and F600.

The two new systems are the first arrays to utilize 1x nanometer MLC flash, directly challenging hybrid HDD/SSD arrays on cost-per-gigabyte for server virtualization and VDI while delivering the superior reliability, consistent performance, and lower operating costs of all-flash storage.  Aside from that, the Gemini F400 and F600 also set new performance records, delivering 2-5x greater IOps and lower latency than competing offerings, extending Nimbus Data’s market leadership in low-latency applications like databases, analytics, and OLTP.

“Cloudmark heavily benchmarked and evaluated a number of hybrid and all-flash storage solutions to increase our virtualization density in order to slash OpEx costs, stated Ryan White, VP of Operations at Cloudmark, the global leader in messaging threat protection for communication service providers. “Nimbus Data was the clear winner in our evaluations, and the Gemini’s performance and value has given us plenty of headroom for further expansion.”

Maintaining integrity, reducing cost

Wikibon Co-Founder and CTO David Floyer stated that by using the next generation technology, Nimbus was able to improve the cost-effective of flash, increased the availability and liability by still offering the 10-year warranty, and the speed has greatly improved.

“In terms of performance, most of the all-flash arrays are quickly improving their performance and the performance for network-attached, in other words for systems-attached to SAN or that are able to connect to multiple processes, it is now getting to a stage where it’s fast enough, it can do most of the jobs that you want for a network-attached.  They’re still not competing with the PCIE direct attached, it’s tensions of memory, those that are stored in a significant share of the market, but very fast indeed,” Floyer said in a recent appearance on our Live NewsDesk Show (full segment below).

Though there are others in this space, Floyer noted that his team of analysts have focused more on the PCIE directly attached cards, but as for Nimbus, it “has done extremely well in cranking the technology, owning a lot of the technology and being able to combine it to get extremely effective performance and reliability from it, and very great productivity as well.”

Nimbus is expected to go public next year, in time for the flash array market to explode, and Floyer stated that Nimbus CEO and Founder Thomas Isakovich’s strategy has been working well for the company.  Instead of living off of investments, Isakovich has lived off in small angel investments, profited from it, then used the profit to expand.  This strategy may be deemed crazy by others but if you look at it in the long run, but it allows Isakovich a lot more control of the company, take a much more aggressive long term strategy, and if it goes to an IPO, the money raise in the IPO will be put back into the company itself instead of going to venture capitals’ pockets.

For more of Floyer’s Breaking Analysis on Nimbus and its new flash array offerings, check out the NewsDesk video below: