Nirvana was virtual object storage software developed and maintained by General Atomics. It can also be described as metadata, data placement and data management software that lets organizations manage unstructured data on multiple storage devices located anywhere in the world in order to orchestrate global data intensive workflows, and search for and locate data no matter where it is located or when it was created. Nirvana does this by capturing system and user-defined metadata to enable detailed search and enact policies to control data movement and protection. Nirvana also maintains data provenance, audit, security and access control. Nirvana can reduce storage costs by identifying data to be moved to lower cost storage and data that no longer needs to be stored.
History Nirvana is the result of research started in 1995 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) (which was founded by and run at the time by General Atomics), in response to a DARPA sponsored project for a Massive Data Analysis System. Led by General Atomics computational plasma physicist Dr. Reagan Moore, development continued through the cooperative efforts of General Atomics and the SDSC on the Storage Resource Broker (SRB), with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). SRB 1.1 was delivered in 1998, demonstrating a logical distributed file system with a single Global Namespace across geographically distributed storage systems. In 2003, General Atomics turned over operation of the SDSC to the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and Dr. Moore became a full-time professor there establishing the Data Intensive Computing Environments (DICE) Center, continuing development of SRB. In that same year, General Atomics acquired the exclusive license to develop a commercial version of SRB, calling it Nirvana. The DICE team ended development of SRB in 2006 and started a rules oriented data management project called iRODS for open source distribution. Dr. Moore and his DICE team relocated to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where iRODS is now maintained by the iRODS Consortium. General Atomics continued development of Nirvana at their San Diego headquarters, focusing on capabilities to serve government and commercial users, including high scalability, fail-over, performance, implementation, maintenance and support.
In 2009, General Atomics won a data management contract with the US Department of Defense (DOD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The requirements of this contract focused General Atomics to expand Nirvana's performance, scalability, security and ease of use. A major deliverable involved integrating Nirvana with Oracle Corporation's SAM-QFS filesystem to provide a policy-based Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system with near real-time event synchronization. General Atomics also announced that digital marketing firm infoGROUP deployed Nirvana to create a Global Name Space across three of infoGROUP's computer operations centers in the Omaha area. In 2012, General Atomics released Nirvana version 4.3. In 2014, General Atomics changed the Nirvana business model from a large government contract, fee for service model, to a standard commercial software model. In 2015, General Atomics initiated a strategic relationship with pixitmedia/arcastream in the United Kingdom, integrating Nirvana with pixitmedia and arcastream's products. In 2016, General Atomics released Nirvana version 5.0. General Atomics's support for Nirvana ceased prior to May 2018. As of that date, probes of Nirvana marketing and support URLs under the General Atomics corporate umbrella return "cannot be found" or result in a connection timeout. Archived Nirvana pages and press releases are retrievable via the General Atomics website.
Architecture and operation Nirvana is client-server software composed of Location Agents that reside on, or access, Storage Resources. A Storage Resource can be a networked-attached storage (NAS) system, object storage system or cloud storage service. Nirvana catalogs the location of the files and objects in these storage resources into its Metadata Catalog (MCAT) and tags the files with storage system metadata (Owner, File Name, File Size and Creation, Change, Modification and Access Timestamps) and additional user-defined, domain specific metadata. System and user-defined metadata can be used to search for a file or object (or groups of files and objects) and also control access to and move those files and objects from one storage resource to another. The MCAT creates a single Global Namespace across all Storage Resources connected to it so users and administrators can search for, access, and move data across multiple heterogeneous storage systems from multiple vendors across geographically dispersed data centers. The MCAT is connected to and interacts with a relational database management system to support its operation. Multiple MCATs can be deployed for horizontal scale-out and failover. Various Clients can interact with Nirvana including the supplied Web browser and Java based GUI Clients, a Command Line Interface, a native Windows virtual network drive interface, and user-developed applications via supplied APIs.
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