Press Releases

Microsoft SQL Server Performance Issues Declared EOL with Arrival of Nimbus Flash Memory Systems

Nimbus E-Class and S-Class systems praised by customers for making database bottlenecks and tuning a thing of the past

South San Francisco, CA, September 20, 2012 – Nimbus Data Systems, Inc., the leader in Sustainable Storage®, today announced new customer wins in performance-critical Microsoft SQL Server environments. Aerospace Optics, Inc., a leading manufacturer of precision display equipment for military applications, selected the award-winning Nimbus S-Class as the foundation for its new low-latency SAN infrastructure. Loxogon, Inc., a leading provider of real-time revenue cycle solutions for the healthcare industry, chose the highly-scalable Nimbus E-Class flash memory system to dramatically accelerate their existing SQL Server deployment. These customers, and many more, discovered that implementing Nimbus flash memory technology is simpler and more effective than tiering, caching, spindle short-stroking and endless attempts at performance tuning with legacy disk arrays.

“IT environments continue to demand greater performance and flexibility,” said Pushan Rinnen, Research Director at Gartner. “Flash technology is empowering customers to meet the challenging requirement to improve processes in today’s high performance applications while shrinking the datacenter footprint dramatically.”

Aerospace Optics chose the Nimbus S-Class flash memory system as part of its migration to a fully-virtualized environment. The company’s heavily utilized ERP application, which relies on a large Microsoft SQL Server database, struggled to keep pace. Nimbus’ low-latency storage freed Aerospace Optics of their previous performance constraints, allowing them to eliminate underutilized servers, reduce power consumption by 3000 watts, and reduce SQL backup times from 18 minutes to just 3 minutes.

“The introduction of the Nimbus S-Class allowed us to build out our SAN with speed and reliability previously unattainable with other tested HDD and SSD solutions,” said Michael Perry, Director of IT at Aerospace Optics, Inc. “The performance of the Nimbus S-Class cut our SQL backup times by nearly 90%. We also found Nimbus’ price/performance per TB to be significantly better than competitors.”

For Loxogon, Inc., a software provider that enables real-time access to healthcare operational data, rapid response time is essential to its success. With prior disk-based solutions, complex customer transactions and SQL maintenance operations experienced prolonged latency and bottlenecks. The company needed to make a fundamental change to their storage infrastructure and opted for flash memory. Following the implementation of the Nimbus E-Class system, average disk latency improved nearly 100x and complex transaction and query times decreased by nearly 95%.

“In order to optimize Loxogon’s software, we needed to eliminate the IO limit imposed by our existing rotational disk arrays,” explains Andrew Yashchuk, CEO of Loxogon. “We had two objectives with our storage project: improve our customer experience and accelerate all business operations dependent on SQL Server. The Nimbus E-Class enabled us to achieve both while also increasing storage capacity within our budget. Index rebuilds that took up to hours are now down to minutes, and transactions that took up to 10 seconds are now down to 200 milliseconds or less.”

About Aerospace Optics

Aerospace Optics, Inc. is an ISO 9001 Registered company. Products manufactured include the VIVISUN LED, the VIVISUN 5000, and the VIVISUN 95. The company’s products meet a variety of military specifications and feature solid state circuitry and innovative electronics.

About Loxogon

Headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, IL, Loxogon, Inc. provides real-time revenue cycle solutions for the healthcare industry. Loxogon develops Loxogon® Alloy™, a platform built on an agile extensible architecture, which supports applications that guide healthcare providers in operational decision making.

About Nimbus Data Systems

Nimbus develops award-winning Sustainable Storage® systems, the most intelligent and efficient solid state storage platform engineered for server and desktop virtualization, databases, HPC, and next-generation cloud infrastructure. Combining low-latency flash memory hardware, comprehensive data management software, on-demand capacity scalability, and multiprotocol storage capabilities, Nimbus systems deliver up to 10x greater performance and 80% lower operating costs than conventional disk-based primary storage arrays, all at a comparable acquisition cost. Nimbus solutions are installed worldwide at the most demanding data-intensive corporations and government agencies. For more information, visit www.nimbusdata.com or follow Nimbus at www.twitter.com/nimbusdata.