FMS 2024: Nimbus Data BatArray Mobile Data Center Powered by Tesla Cybertruck

Nimbus Data, Inc. unwrapped BatArray, a fusion of the company’s FlashRack all-flash systems with Tesla’s Cybertruck, creating the world’s first mobile flash storage data center.

BatArray demonstrates the energy efficiency of Nimbus Data’s all-flash systems and the sophistication of Tesla’s EV battery technology, showcasing a new way to tackle the massive data challenges brought on by the AI age.

“While I do not know if Elon Musk envisioned a bullet-proof data center on wheels when designing Cybertruck, Tesla has engineered a phenomenal machine with exactly that potential,” stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder, Nimbus Data. “We are ecstatic to showcase what is possible by uniting Cybertruck with the most energy efficient flash storage system on the market.“

Massive Storage Capacity Designed to Tackle Data Challenges at the Edge
Industry analysts predict that data growth at the edge will soon exceed data growth at traditional data centers, creating a new challenge – how to move this data for analysis, archival, or data migration purposes. Moving petabytes of data like digital media, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take months or years across the fastest networks, an unacceptable reality that is constrained by the limitations of fiber optic networks and physics itself.

BatArray uses 6 FlashRack Turbo systems, each storing 1.5PB, to house 9PB of raw all-flash storage. After considering redundancy and 3:1 data reduction, 25PB of effective capacity is possible. Cybertruck provides a 240V 40A power circuit in the truck bed. Although originally intended to power work tools in the field, because FlashRack Turbo is so energy efficient, it is possible to run the whole infrastructure from this single circuit. With its 123kWh battery, Cybertruck can power the entire storage system for up 24 hours entirely from its EV battery.

Multi-Terabit Per Second Ingress and Egress Rates with AES-256 Encryption
Wrapped in a sleek black finish, BatArray looks fit for a superhero, and its performance reflects that. With its patented Parallel Memory Architecture, BatArray delivers up to 360GB/s of ingress performance, or approximately 3Tb/s. This data rate is 3x faster than the massive AWS Snowmobile, Amazon’s original data transfer vehicle based on a 45-foot long semi-trailer truck. All data is automatically encrypted in hardware using AES-256 with KMIP support. Egress speed is even faster, reaching up to 600GB/s, or nearly 5Tb/s.

At maximum performance, one can fill BatArray to capacity in about 7 hours, still leaving over 200 miles over range in the Cybertruck battery for it to reach its destination without even needing to stop to charge. With 400GbE FR4 fiber cabling and transceivers, this transmission rate is possible over 2km, allowing for long distance between BatArray and the source or destination connection points. BatArray supports industry standard NFS, SMB, S3, and NVMe-oF protocols.

See BatArray in Action
The company is showcasing BatArray at the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara, California, from August 6-8, 2024.