General Atomics Introducing Nirvana 5.0 Data Aware Intelligent Storage Software

General Atomics (GA) announced the next generation of Nirvana, a metadata, data placement and data management software solution for the demanding workflows in life sciences, scientific research, media and entertainment and energy exploration.

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Nirvana 5.0 reduces storage costs by 75% ^(*) by turning geographically dispersed, multiple vendor storage silos into a single global namespace that automatically moves infrequently-accessed data to lower-cost storage or to the cloud. It can locate hard-to-find data by querying comprehensive user-defined, workflow-specific metadata describing the data stored – no matter where it is located or when it was created.

Nirvana 5.0 features performance and functionality enhancements:

• One million files per minute file system scan rate

• Optimized for fast operation with PostgresSQL, the world’s most advanced open-source database, eliminating the need to use expensive, commercial databases for large-scale deployments

• Upgraded intuitive GUI

• Support for Google Cloud Storage

• Added Python and C# Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

• Query policies now support regular expressions using a ‘similar to’ operation

• Native 64-bit Windows support

• Enhanced documentation

• Extensive coding examples included in the SDK

Compared to open-source solutions, Nirvana 5.0 is faster, more reliable with no single point of failure or need for separate zones, and it is easier to use with an integrated GUI. It also costs less by eliminating the need for expensive commercial database software, and requires fewer administrators and less hardware to operate.

^(*) Cost savings based on moving data from $1,000/TB tier 1 storage to $250/TB object storage.