Nirvana does this by capturing system and user-defined metadata to enable detailed search and enact policies to control data movement and protection.

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[1]), in response to a DARPA sponsored project for a Massive Data Analysis System.

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.

[4] The DICE team ended development of SRB in 2006 and started a rules oriented data management project called iRODS[5] for open source distribution.

[6] 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.

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.

In 2015, General Atomics initiated a strategic relationship with pixitmedia/arcastream in the United Kingdom, integrating Nirvana with pixitmedia and arcastream’s products.

Nirvana can automate the grouping and distribution of data files into a virtual collection - based on user-friendly logical rules.

For example, user-defined metadata can be used to identify data files needing to be transferred between collaborators with domain-specific attributes (experiment, study, project, etc.).

With Nirvana, data can be shared and used with verified provenance of the conditions under which it was generated – so results are reproducible and analyzable for defects.