99.999% Annual Uptime for Nimble Installed Hybrid Systems

Experiencing unplanned system downtime leaves a lot at stake for businesses, including damage to mission-critical data or even legal repercussions. To address availability challenges, Nimble Storage, Inc., provider of flash-optimized hybrid storage solutions, has taken a ground-up approach to designing modern storage systems.

In addition, the company leverages big data and cloud-based technologies, further increasing availability and resiliency, resulting in a storage infrastructure that consistently runs at peak condition. 

Based on its approach, Nimble Storage has achieved Five Nines or greater than 99.999% annual uptime as observed across its installed base of systems.     
 
Historically, storage vendors have made HA claims based on statistical projections or have re-architected their products to add on capabilities to achieve higher levels of reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS). Taking a ground-up approach, Nimble built its software architecture, CASL, with design elements such as redundant hardware, no single points of failure, and fully non-disruptive upgrades – all of which address today’s availability challenges. Furthermore, Nimble’s approach to storage lifecycle management, Nimble Storage InfoSight, leverages the data science to deliver storage health and operational efficiency.
 
InfoSight monitors thousands of end user systems and provides enterprises with proactive awareness of the health of their storage system. This allows customers to streamline maintenance by enabling alerting functions, forecast their future needs accurately, and realize a level of overall storage health that vastly improves productivity and system availability. One of the standard metrics for measuring availability is system uptime, and the ultimate benchmark for vendors to prove success is by achieving Five Nines. 

InfoSight analyzed detailed availability data across the Nimble installed base, and found that Nimble Storage achieved greater than 99.999% uptime, observing 99.9997% availability over the time period of July 2012 through November 2013.

The breakdown of time by category in our data is:

• Uptime 99.41258%
• Planned downtime 0.57925%
• Environmental downtime 0.00789%
• Unplanned downtime 0.00029%

This gives an observed availability value of 99.9997% across the Nimble installed base of thousands of systems.
 
In fact, the collective uptime of installed arrays increases over time, a testament to InfoSight. As the InfoSight engine collects and analyzes data across the installed base, it becomes ‘smarter’ about recognizing potential issues and proactively sending alerts to customers, which can help resolve potential problems before they result in unplanned downtime events. Further proactive wellness features built into InfoSight ensure best practices are enforced ensuring operations and performance.
 
“As a financial institution, unplanned downtime not only is a huge expense, but it’s a liability. Nimble Storage InfoSight offers us the peace of mind we need to focus on our own line of business. With Nimble Storage, we don’t have to worry about running a business critical workload. By monitoring the health of our storage system and leveraging historical trends and real-time alerts, we’re able to prevent any issues before they arise,” said Jeremy Olde, information systems manager, Global Financial Review, Inc.
 
“At Ideal Integrations, we ensure that our clients get the most out of their investment with us, and we never offer an IT solution without guaranteeing that it meets our stringent internal standards.  If we do not believe in a technology, we will not rely on it or ask our clients to do the same.  Nimble Storage has proven to be an extremely resilient platform for our clients.  Their satisfaction and the availability of their data is critical to our business.  With that being said: we confidently use and recommend Nimble Storage,” said Christopher Fox, director of technology, Ideal Integrations, Inc.
 
“Achieving ‘five nines’ in only three years of shipping our product is a huge industry validation for Nimble Storage. Availability is usually just a vendor claim based on statistical projections, but our ‘five nines’ achievement is reported from real world data, proving we offer the highest level of system availability.  We did not treat availability as an afterthought when building our storage architecture.  Our CASL software and InfoSight offer a unique approach to storage and management that helps ease customers’ fear of the effects of unplanned downtime,” said Rod Bagg, VP of customer support, Nimble.
 

Video by Enterprise Strategy Group: Five Nines Availability with Nimble Storage InfoSight