Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Now App-Centric

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced a suite of features that are optimized around fast and predictable application delivery.

Nimble Storage appliance

The company’s Predictive Flash platform allows IT to deliver applications confidently with QoS and secure multi-tenancy across VMware, OpenStack, KVM and Docker containers. With app-centric management within InfoSight Predictive Analytics businesses have more visibility and control of application performance. App-based Storage on Demand provides a cloud-like pricing model where enterprises only pay for the storage consumed by each application. This app-centric approach provides greater predictability and ease of management for applications across the enterprise.

“Infrastructure exists only to meet the demands of applications,” said Ajay Singh, VP, product management, Nimble. “We recognize the need to bridge the gap between the application and storage owner. By taking an app-centric approach, IT teams are better positioned to meet the service level demands of the business. With new features like QoS and secure multi-tenancy we are providing enterprises with predictable performance, simplicity of management, and secure isolation of applications across the enterprise.“

QoS and secure multi-tenancy deliver predictable application performance
To meet application SLAs, the company enables customers to consolidate infrastructure and manage applications with predictable performance through secure multi-tenancy and QoS. Multi-tenant storage allows secure application management and isolation while QoS prevents rogue workloads from impacting critical applications.

Application delivery model options now include docker containers
Businesses want the flexibility to deliver applications using the framework of their choice without increased complexity. The firm supports native persistent storage for Docker containers. The company already delivers app-level granularity through VMware VVols and native support for OpenStack clouds. The depth of the app-centric integration across these platforms – policy-based application provisioning, clones, snapshots, replication and encryption – is the core of modern application delivery support.

InfoSight VMVision
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App-centric management through predictive analytics
InfoSight VMVision gives customers visibility across the storage-to-VM infrastructure stack. It allows organizations to automatically identify noisy VM neighbors by narrowing down the exact application that is draining resources from other workloads. Where traditional storage based insights do not provide granular data for capacity planning and forecasting, it provides IT with app-level capacity data for accurate storage planning.

“InfoSight allows us to identify issues throughout the entire infrastructure stack – not just storage. Through VMvision we’ve been able to track down host or network latency when experiencing poor performance on a particular VM or group of VMs. We’ve also tracked down “misbehaving” VMs simply by using the ‘Top VMs’ tabs to show their utilization in IO/s. We’re instantly able to see that one VM is way above others,” said Andrew Stock, senior systems engineer, Modern Health. “InfoSight provided this in-depth level of detail when no other tool gave me the basic information I needed.“

App-based pricing for storage on demand provides cloud-like agility
Company’s on Demand ensures users only pay for the application storage that they use, whether usage goes up or down. Customers can consume storage based on application usage exactly as they do in a cloud environment. Based on a pre-set app-specific SLA customers can pay for what they consume starting from 6.8 cents per gigabyte per month for All Flash storage ^(*).

^(*) Based on U.S. pricing only. Pricing and availability vary by application, SLA, and region.

Resources:
Mind the Gap: How Application Delays Affect Company Performance report
Research report: Can Machine Learning Prevent Application Downtime?