FMS 2024: Nimbus Data ExaDrive EN, Multiprotocol Ethernet SSD
Enables efficient disaggregated infrastructure for AI and hyperscale.
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on August 14, 2024 at 2:01 pmNimbus Data, Inc. unveiled the new ExaDrive EN line of Ethernet native SSDs, the world’s first multiprotocol SSDs supporting NVMe-oF and NFS protocols.
ExaDrive EN enables an efficient flash fabric built on high-performance Ethernet, providing a new way for AI-driven organizations and cloud providers to scale their data infrastructure.
“ExaDrive EN is the culmination of Nimbus Data’s years of expertise building the most advanced all-flash systems and the most efficient high capacity SSDs,” stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder. “ExaDrive EN reshapes the way storage is deployed at massive scale by putting flash directly on Ethernet networks, reducing latency, IO contention, and data center costs.”
Ethernet Native and Software Rich to Enable New Possibilities and Scale
First attempts at Ethernet SSDs by other vendors were inherently limited. Instead of a truly Ethernet native approach, prior Ethernet SSDs were simply NVMe SSDs with an NVMe-to-Ethernet converter ASIC attached to them, either inside the SSD itself or as an adapter card on the SSD drive carrier. This approach is functional but lacks both software intelligence and processing power. As a result, such products provided only basic block storage, performed slower than NVMe SSDs, and failed to take full advantage of the tremendous new opportunities that Ethernet networks provide.
With ExaDrive EN, Nimbus Data implemented its own patented design that is both Ethernet native and rich in software. Instead of relying on a converter ASIC, ExaDrive EN is based on an ARM SoC that provides processing power to support features beyond just block storage. The company ported its HALO software to ARM, setting the stage for an intelligent Ethernet SSD with unique capabilities. Today, those capabilities include native NFS and NVMe-oF/TCP protocol support, AES-256 inline encryption, and full data checksums to remediate silent corruption automatically. In the future, additional data processing capabilities will be possible, ranging from compression to S3-compliant object storage to parallel file systems. ExaDrive EN will be initially available in 16TB capacity using TLC flash with higher capacities expected in 2025.
Industry Standard Form Factor and Connectivity Backed by SNIA
While using the same 2.5″ form factor and U.2 connector of industry-standard NVMe SSDs, Ethernet SSDs require enclosures that are designed for Ethernet signals, not PCIe signals. As this enclosure ecosystem develops, ExaDrive EN is ready. Embracing industry standards, ExaDrive EN adheres to the SNIA Native NVMe-oF Drive Spec v1.1 to ensure compatibility with EBOF (Ethernet Bunch of Flash) and Ethernet switch-based enclosures.
“SNIA is very excited to see the continued adoption of standards created by our Technical Working Groups (TWGs),” said Dr. J Metz, chair, SNIA board of directors. “Nimbus Data has taken advantage of the latest features in the Native NVMe-oF Drive Spec in their new ExaDrive EN Ethernet native SSD, which will help promote open standards and foster a healthy solutions ecosystem.“
The Power of Disaggregated Flash with Ethernet Native SSDs
With Ethernet native SSDs, organizations can embrace disaggregation to build a more efficient and more scalable data infrastructure. In the old way, adding storage capacity often meant adding servers, NICs, switches, DRAM, controllers, and software licenses – even if only storage capacity was needed. Even then, the data path to access this flash capacity required a maze of hardware and software IO operations. Each incremental operation further increased latency and power consumption. With ExaDrive EN, flash becomes a directly accessible, low overhead, and network native resource, reducing power consumption, eliminating complexity, and improving scalability.
Hosts connect to ExaDrive EN SSDs using NVMe-oF/TCP and NFS clients built-in to major OSs. ExaDrive EN SSDs can be managed and divided into virtual namespaces using Nimbus Data’s HALO web interface, CLI, or RESTful API. To hosts, these namespaces appear as standard block devices (with NVMe-oF) or file storage mountpoints (with NFS), so existing applications can leverage them without modification. Combined with scale-out file systems, ExaDrive EN SSDs can be unified into one global namespace, enabling organizations to build exabyte-scale storage with lower Capex and Opex costs than conventional server-based approaches.
ExaDrive EN SSDs will ship in 4Q24.
The vendor was showcasing ExaDrive EN at the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara, California, from August 6-8.
Comments
It was a good surprise to meet again Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus Data, during the recent FMS conference.
We checked the web site and we didn't find any press release since 2021 but we understand that the team worked on various developments. And for good reasons as the company just issued 4 press releases about HALO, BatArray, ExaDrive EN and FlashRack with its Solid State Packs.
ExaDrive EN is an interesting approach that presents a new iteration following what Marvell did in the past but also Seagate with its Kinetic initiative or gadgets from Igneous or OpenIO. These attempts already exposed the internal datastore with an interface different from the block mode. But it appears that all these have hit a wall. We saw also tries with the opposite approach starting with a Raspberry Pi and SD card or M.2 NVMe SSD still with an ethernet connection versus a drive coupled with a SoC card. Both can be exposed via multi-protocols beyond block and it could be object or file. But here the ExaDrive EN would receive in the future real attractive capacity that invite users to think about new deployments and processing models.
We think that edge deployments could be a good application and with file stripper in front like pNFS it could represent an interesting dynamic scalable model, all these being standards.
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