Irvine, CA, August 7, 2024 – Nimbus Data today unveiled HALO Atmosphere, the latest and most powerful release of its flagship storage software. HALO is a comprehensive data management platform encompassing block, file, and object storage. Unlike point products with specific hardware and software focused on narrow use cases, HALO was designed from the ground up to provide a universal platform with workload-specific optimization in software. This enables organizations to streamline their storage infrastructure, reducing cost and improving agility.

“HALO stands for Holistic Architecture – Limitless and Open, and its powerful data management capabilities meet that ambitious vision,” stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO and Founder of Nimbus Data. “HALO Atmosphere is the result of seven exciting years of extremely focused software development by our team. Whether in the data center, in the enterprise, in the public cloud, or at the edge, HALO now provides one software platform for protecting, managing, and scaling it all.”

Flexspaces Deliver the Ultimate Accelerated Data Platform

In this new release, HALO introduces Flexspaces, enabling the broadest data consolidation of any storage platform on the market. With Flexspaces, all data types and protocols can share one logical pool, including block (NVMe-oF, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, SRP), file (NFS, SMB), and object (S3-compliant) storage. “Logical” is the critical term, because while other so-called unified storage systems may promise block and file support, those systems still need to be partitioned for each data type. As a result, administrators must manage the underlying storage capacity separately, resulting in poor resource utilization, challenges in capacity forecasting, and greater complexity.

While “universal” may suggest a “one-size-fits-all” approach, HALO delivers the exact opposite. Flexspaces offer four built-in policies to optimize the data pipeline for specific workloads.

• Intelligent: tunes the storage for use cases like virtualization, databases, and cloud infrastructure, enabling compression, snapshots, thin provisioning, and replication,
• Extreme: supercharges the storage for maximum bandwidth and IOps, perfect for AI, high-performance computing, and rich media workloads that demand speed above all,
• Archive: prioritizes data reduction via deep compression algorithms to maximize capacity utilization and reduce storage cost, ideal for high-speed backup and digital archives,
• Transport: leverages encryption and mirroring to configure the system for capturing data at the edge that will later be physically transported to other locations for analysis.

With Flexspaces, organizations can simplify and future-proof their storage infrastructure, whether on-premise or in the public cloud, and tune storage behavior to optimize for virtually any use case.

Centralize Management at Scale and Reduce Hardware and OpEx Costs

While scale-out architectures have drawn significant interest in the era of AI and cloud computing, scale-out is costly, requiring substantial investments in equipment and personnel. High-speed networks between storage nodes in the cluster are required. Since each scale-out node lacks redundancy, erasure coding becomes essential, multiplying hardware costs. Resolving issues is challenging because of the complexity of the cluster, requiring IT expertise in storage, servers, and networking. As scale-out clusters grow, any disruption can impact all data, increasing risk.

Federation provides a much simpler and more affordable approach. With federation, as storage requirements grow, organizations can deploy additional redundant storage systems, such as Nimbus Data’s FlashRack. Unlike scale-out designs, however, Federation provides centralized administration without the complexity and cost of a cluster network. Erasure coding is eliminated, reducing hardware, space, and power costs. Since each system in the Federation provides high availability, a catastrophic failure will be isolated, as opposed to compromising an entire cluster.

Federation with Intelligent Workload Placement Enables Scale with Ease

Scale-out became popular as data growth outpaced storage system capacity growth. Times have changed, however. With systems such as Nimbus Data’s FlashRack offering 5 PB of effective capacity in just one system, Federation can meet the capacity needs of most customers. Adding additional storage systems linearly increases both capacity and performance, without the need to rebalance existing data. As systems are added to the Federation, HALO uses machine learning to provide advice on how to place new workloads in an optimal manner. Advanced users can automate storage provisioning and other tasks with a comprehensive and easy-to-use RESTful API.

Pricing and Availability

HALO Atmosphere is available today with Nimbus Data’s all-flash systems. HALO will be available on the public cloud in Q4 2024. Nimbus Data is showcasing HALO at the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara, California, from August 6-8, 2024, booth 803. To learn more, contact Nimbus Data at [email protected] and visit our website at www.nimbusdata.com.

About Nimbus Data

Founded in 2003, Nimbus Data develops innovative flash storage solutions for data-intensive applications in cloud, AI, enterprise, and edge infrastructure. Our solutions include the powerful HALO storage software, FlashRack® all-flash systems, ExaDrive® solid state drives, and the ground-breaking Tectonic customer experience. Nimbus Data helps hundreds of organizations accelerate and protect their most critical data assets. To learn more, visit us at www.nimbusdata.com.