Furthermore, the five-year fixed cost for the Nimbus system--the purchase price plus product support--is $174,920 versus $227,908 for HDD. The 80% savings on power and cooling costs are on top of that, according to the eBay study.
"Because we have software and because we have very competitive acquisition costs, we are uniquely positioned to really take on conventional disk [storage]," says Isakovich.
While Nimbus’s numbers look impressive, all-flash is still a tough sell to most customers because of the upfront costs, says Jim Handy, an analyst with the research firm Objective Analysis. "It’s a very hard sell," Handy says. "It takes a complete change in the mindset of the data center manager."
Most data center managers or CIOs buy storage first on security, meaning reliability and high uptime, and only second on performance, he says. The only market for all-flash storage systems would be for those enterprises that judge performance to be their top priority and for which money is no object.
But Nimbus is targeting a broader base of customers with what it says are competitive TCO numbers. Nimbus’ target customer, Handy says, "is some daring soul who puts his job on the line and will say, 'Let’s try using solid state storage. Yes, it's more expensive, but it will probably get us out of the problem that we’re in.'"
Handy mentioned Violin Memory as another vendor of all-flash storage systems.
The S-Class appliances come in three sizes, based on capacity. An S-Class with up to 2.5 TB capacity starts at $24,995, a 5 TB model at $49,999 and a 10 TB model at $99,995.
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