Nimble Storage Introducing SmartStack Converged Infrastructure Solution

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced a SmartStack converged infrastructure solution leveraging Oracle Corp.‘s Linux, VM, and Database, running on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS).

This solution provides organizations with the ability to meet Oracle database performance demands and scale without disruption or increased capital expenses.

Nimble launched a series of SmartStack reference architectures that eliminate the challenges associated with deploying application, server, hypervisor, networking, and storage components as an integrated solution. At the heart of every SmartStack solution is a pre-validated reference architecture leveraging Nimble Storage CS-Series and strategic partners’ solutions. By testing and validating the combined solutions, Nimble Storage helps organizations accelerate deployment and minimize risk associated with deploying solutions in the data center, whether it be for server virtualization, VDI, business critical applications or data protection.

Highlights of SmartStack Validated Reference Architecture
with Oracle

• The new solution is tested and validated using both Oracle Validated Configuration test kit and Nimble Storage’s test environments.
• The solution components include a Nimble Storage CS-series array, two Cisco UCS B200 M3 blade servers, Oracle VM 3.2, Oracle Linux 6 Update 4 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Database 12c.

Leveraging Flash-optimized Hybrid Storage for Oracle Databases
Deploying the right storage solution is critical when utilizing Oracle Database to support business-critical applications. Database administrators and architects realize the importance of storage in maintaining services levels and staying in budget, especially in the face of rapid growth. However, the time and cost associated with the procuring, provisioning and continuous tuning of infrastructure can be a burden to IT organizations. To address the challenges of both analytic and transactional workloads, Nimble Storage offers a storage solution to deliver adaptive performance with HA, capacity savings, efficient data protection, and improved staff productivity while handling rapid growth.

Nimble Storage’s flash-based architecture allows customers with Oracle workloads running on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM to take advantage of:

• Adaptive performance to grow performance and/or capacity to scale to the needs of OLTP and OLAP applications as they grow
• Ease of deployment with pre-configured optimizations and performance profiles to minimize the guesswork of tuning the infrastructure for performance
• Integrated data protection and enhanced availability enabling organizations to take more frequent backups without disrupting applications, and facilitate quick recovery with snapshots

Oracle Linux brings the latest Linux innovations to market, delivering performance, scalability, and reliability for enterprise applications and systems along with worldwide, enterprise, low-cost support. Optimized for enterprise workloads, Oracle Linux offers zero downtime updates. Offering benefits beyond simple server consolidation, Oracle VM’s application-driven virtualization design enables rapid enterprise application deployment and simplifies lifecycle management in a cloud environment.

Nimble Storage exhibited its flash-optimized hybrid storage arrays and new converged infrastructure solutions at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 taking place September 22 – 26 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

Nimble Storage is a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

“Yesterday’s state of the art servers and storage were no longer positioned to efficiently meet the growing needs of our organization. State of the art for us meant being able to cost effectively provide solid IO gains to our virtualized Oracle environments. Nimble has provided us with solid performance gains up to 50% at a dramatically lower cost than our prior storage solution. As we now prepare to move our legacy hosts to Cisco UCS, we expect further gains in performance from this truly state of the art architecture,” said David Guilinger, director of information services, Gateway Health Plan.

“Converged and integrated systems have rapidly moved from evaluation environments to deployments running production applications. We’re seeing a very high level of confidence in these types of systems as large and midsized companies leverage integrated systems to decrease time to deployment, reduce downtime, lower operation costs, and improve resource utilization. Nimble Storage’s expansion of their SmartStack offering helps to ensure they can capitalize on this current market movement by offering a larger portion of their current and future customers such benefits,” said Eric Sheppard, research director, storage, IDC.

“More and more large enterprises with complex IT environments are deploying Oracle Database workloads using Oracle Linux and Oracle VM. A pre-validated architecture comprised of application, server and storage is beneficial for enterprises that want to eliminate the guesswork with various deployment scenarios,” said Monica Kumar, senior director, product marketing, Oracle.

“By utilizing our intelligent storage architecture, organizations can deploy affordable DR while meeting the performance and availability needs of storage teams and DBAs, without the complexity of traditional solutions. In addition, Nimble Storage customers experience significant capacity savings with compression for database workloads,” said Radhika Krishnan, VP of product marketing and alliances, Nimble Storage.