1,200 Customers Deployed Nimble Storage Scale-Out Architecture

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced that more than 1,200 customer systems have been deployed with the company’s scale-out storage architecture to obtain higher levels of performance and capacity, while simplifying storage management.

Available to all customers, Nimble Storage’s scale-out approach eliminates capacity silos and performance hotspots through automatic balancing of performance and capacity. Customers benefit from extending their storage investment and enhancing the flexibility and agility needed to support the growth of numerous business-critical applications without disruption.

Organizations are able to manage the unpredictability of data growth and application performance through a scale out approach; however the majority of scale out storage solutions introduces management complexity and disruption. Nimble’s scale out software eliminates this complexity by allowing customers to manage multiple nodes as a single entity. The company’s clustering technology allows for application data to reside on more than one physical node, allowing enterprise workloads to take advantage of CPU, memory, flash and capacity resources across multiple storage arrays. In addition, Nimble’s Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) file system decouples performance from spindle drives. This CPU bound approach allows customers to linearly scale their storage system performance.

Since the scale-out architecture consolidates storage hardware into a single, manageable entity, customers are maximizing flexibility and headroom for growth while enhancing storage operational efficiency, including:

• Intelligent routing of IO requests to the right destination node without introducing additional hops or dedicated high bandwidth connectivity.
• Investment protection is preserved as a single cluster can accommodate storage nodes of different performance and capacity levels for management purposes.
• Scale-to-fit approach gives customers the ability to grow only performance or only capacity through non-disruptive controller upgrades as well as upgrades of flash and disk capacity.
• Through the data analytics of Nimble Storage InfoSight, customers can get expert recommendations on the best approach to scaling cache, compute and capacity in accommodating overall application growth.

Customers can benefit from scale out by upgrading their software. To support fluctuation in customer environments, storage nodes in a cluster can be added or removed as needed.

Tortoise Capital Advisors Increases Capacity with No Disruption
Kansas City-based Tortoise Capital Advisors, LLC, an energy investment management firm, depends on a virtualized environment with business-critical applications, which include multiple SQL databases and SharePoint. The company deployed two Nimble arrays almost two years ago to support the growing performance and capacity demands across these business-critical applications, along with an aggressive data protection strategy. Most recently, the team leveraged Nimble’s scale-out architecture to enhance storage capacity of its DR infrastructure as they brought a new Nimble CS-Series array onboard to support its growing production environment. In clustering the two original arrays at the company’s DR site to expand capacity, they experienced no disruption in service or deterioration in performance, and saw a significant drop in latency.

For IT director Gary Walborn, the flexibility in scaling offered by Nimble was key: “Scale out was one of the top considerations when we were evaluating storage solutions for our datacenter. It was nice to know that we didn’t just have to start over with a forklift upgrade; we could repurpose our initial investment and extend the life of the entire platform, while boosting our DR site storage capacity.“

“Our customers have seen tremendous benefits from our unique and flexible scale-out offering because they don’t need to sacrifice capacity over performance, or vice versa. It is an ideal solution because it allows them to meet demanding workloads without forcing them into a solution that is siloed. With Nimble Storage, they are given the choice of when and how to deploy capacity and performance without breaking the bank on expensive solutions that will expand their overall data footprint and cripple their organization,” said Radhika Krishnan, VP of product marketing and alliances, Nimble Storage.

“In the data centers of our customers, we prefer solutions that are compact, flexibly scalable, high performance, easy to use and reliable while operating. With the scale out approach from Nimble, we have scaled an individual volume on 4 systems with over 200,000 IOs. The Nimble Storage approach fulfills all of our requirements and helps us better service our end users,” said Stephan Schneider, head infrastructure solutions, UP-GREAT AG.

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