Halo shines bright

HALO 2013, the latest enhancement to Nimbus Data’s award-winning storage operating system, provides powerful analytics to gauge the performance and efficiency of Nimbus Data flash memory arrays. A new REST-based API gives administrators full access to all Nimbus features and statistics, facilitating storage management in large multi-vendor data centers. HALO Mobile brings these advanced monitoring features to the palm of your hand, streaming live statistics directly to iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets.

Advanced Flash Memory Analytics
Extending Nimbus Data’s industry-leading unified storage, data protection, and efficiency features, the new HALO 2013 release adds powerful real-time and historical monitoring and reporting capabilities. Over 200 metrics are tracked, including flash endurance, capacity utilization, latency, power consumption, deduplication rates, and overall system health. Customers can view detailed port, host, and session-level statistics, easily navigating back-in-time to observe trends as well as honing in on specific data points at fine-grain intervals. A beautiful new web interfaces enables users to create customized dashboards highlighting key areas of interest, and built-in benchmarking creates IOps and throughput workloads to validate system performance. All statistics are stored in an industry-standard RRD format, enabling customers to utilize Nimbus tools as well as third-party charting software to view the results.

Open REST-based API
Targeting the needs of cloud infrastructure architects, HALO 2013 incorporates a powerful REST-based API (application programming interface), giving users the tools they need to easily integrate the administration and monitoring of Nimbus flash memory arrays into the rest of their data center infrastructure. Through the API, users can perform every function available, from provisioning iSCSI, Fibre Channel, Infiniband, and NFS datastores, to measuring deduplication and creating snapshots. The API captures all available statistics to feed into existing management software and analytics tools. Nimbus’ HALO API lets anyone build application-specific plug-ins, even full management software, eliminating costly license fees and proprietary single-vendor software.

Storage Management in the Palm of Your Hand
Nimbus Data’s storage platforms are also now the first all-flash arrays to feature mobile management, enabling real-time streaming of important system performance, utilization, and health information directly to Apple iOS and Google Android-based devices. Available now for free on the Apple iTunes Store and Google Play store, the HALO Mobile app leverages the API to allow users to monitor system events, view dynamic live charts, and much more, all SSL-encrypted for maximum security. HALO Mobile brings IT administrators closer to their infrastructure, even as data centers become more remote, larger and more complex, to improve service levels and reduce complexity.

“At Nimbus Data, we believe that an open multi-vendor approach is essential to cost-optimizing data centers, both in CapX and OpEx,” stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus Data. “HALO 2013 extends Nimbus Data’s software leadership in the all-flash space. By providing the most in-depth system analytics and an open framework with which to record this data and administer every aspect of the Nimbus all-flash infrastructure, cloud architects and enterprise customers alike gain greater insight into their infrastructure while keeping administration on their terms, not the vendor’s.”