Nimble Storage Transforms Storage Lifecycle With InfoSight

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced a new set of services for its storage arrays called InfoSight.

Built on powerful analytics, systems modeling and intelligent, predictive algorithms, InfoSight harnesses the power of the cloud and deep data to simplify and streamline activities across the storage lifecycle, enabling customers to realize the promise of operational efficiency.

Unlike typical ‘phone-home’ systems, InfoSight’s centralized data collection engine collects comprehensive system data spanning various characteristics including performance, capacity, data protection and system health. Data is securely collected at frequent, five-minute intervals, resulting in a rich and deep set of data, totaling 30 million plus sensor values per array, per day. The data is analyzed on a continuous basis by a sophisticated engine that delivers support, monitoring, reporting, forecasting and planning capabilities to customers. Customer data is never collected as part of this process.

Improved System Availability through Proactive Wellness
This wealth of data and analysis enables Nimble Storage to avert the expense and productivity loss that accompanies a customer support or outage condition. Through the power of pattern recognition and correlation analysis, InfoSight proactively identifies failure conditions before they occur. As a result, more than 80% of Nimble Storage support cases are detected and resolved automatically through proactive wellness capabilities. In addition, intelligent pattern matching and correlation analysis allows Nimble’s support team to quickly and easily triage complex support issues, which typically take days and weeks to resolve using conventional troubleshooting tools and processes.

Intelligent Insights and Precise Forecasting
through InfoSight Portal
Building on this deep data analytics is the Nimble InfoSight portal – a cloud-based tool that allows customers to gain monitoring, reporting, forecasting and planning capabilities through a web-enabled interface. Unlike traditional monitoring tools that produce volumes of copious data, InfoSight provides actionable insights that help customers keep their systems running in top condition.

The InfoSight portal allows customers to specify triggers and thresholds around specific system parameters, notifying them when these are not met and enabling them to enforce best practices. Detailed views around capacity, protection and savings give visibility to system operating conditions. These details allow customers to plan various aspects of their environment, ranging from array upgrades and frequency of snapshotting, to bandwidth provisioning for replication-based upon snapshot frequency and change rates.

Cache and CPU modeling provides recommendations around load balancing, as well as upgrades. This granular guidance combined with Nimble’s scale-to-fit architecture (allows expansion of capacity, cache and CPU individually) eliminates the waste and under-utilization caused by the over-provisioning of storage typically found with other storage offerings.

In addition, an executive dashboard provides a summary view of the capacity savings, protection benefits, and downtime savings the customer has achieved, with a set of recommendations around keeping their environment running at peak condition.

The InfoSight portal is available to all Nimble customers as part of their support subscription package and will be rolled out to the entire customer base in the next 30 days.

The Nimble Community
To help the broader storage community leverage the power of InfoSight’s data capabilities, Nimble is launching NimbleConnect – its storage community forum. In addition to access to knowledge-based articles and road-tested best practices, customers can utilize peer insights for superior system performance. The InfoSight services coupled with the Nimble community enable accelerated productivity by freeing IT staff from mundane, day-to-day storage lifecycle administration so they can focus on high-value tasks.

“Historically, managing storage through its lifecycle has been disconnected, manual and complicated,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage. “Today we are ending that by using sophisticated data sciences to automate an extremely complex set of processes. We believe this is a game-changer in the storage industry and one that will not only differentiate us in the market, but more importantly build long-term customer loyalty.”

“Within a short time of using InfoSight, we have been able to monitor our storage, report on historical trends, plan for future growth, and proactively discover and remediate issues – making management very easy with limited staff,” said Jeff Winter, city/county information systems director, City of Hot Springs, Arkansas.

“While on-premise storage monitoring and management systems generate an abundance of raw data, they invariably struggle to synthesize that data into an easily consumable and actionable format,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG. “InfoSight’s sophisticated analytics can not only short-cut trouble-shooting and remediation, but can also improve capacity and performance planning. Think of it in terms of a holistic health package – we all know that prevention is better than a cure; InfoSight optimizes both of those aspects, but also adds the Portal and Community that help IT ‘bodies’ to work on their ‘diet and exercise’ best practices as well.”