Nimble Storage With Adaptive Flash Platform CS700

Nimble Storage, Inc. enables enterprises to meet performance and capacity requirements for any workload in virtualized datacenters and cloud environments.

Its Adaptive Flash platform provides the performance of flash-only arrays and the capacity of hybrid arrays with the introduction of the CS700 Series arrays and All-Flash Shelf delivering up to 500,000 IO/s, 64TB of flash, and a petabyte of capacity.

By minimizing performance and capacity tradeoffs, the Adaptive Flash platform enables the consolidation of all workloads and eliminates storage silos.

CIOs have struggled to accommodate storage infrastructure quickly and cost effectively to handle data growth and to meet changing requirements. As such, they have been forced to create storage silos to meet SLAs for various types of applications that require different levels of performance and capacity. Adaptive Flash platform dynamically and intelligently allocates storage resources to meet diverse and stringent application demands on a single platform.

Adaptive Flash is based on CASL, Nimble’s patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout architecture, and InfoSight, the company’s automated cloud-based management and support system. The platform is engineered to provide organizations with performance efficiently. Along with integrated data protection and predictive support, enterprise customers can deploy confidently and seamlessly scale their storage infrastructure as their business grows.

The  CS700 Series array can handle performance-intensive enterprise workloads, such as large-scale VDI deployments and high transaction-volume databases, as well as other performance intensive server virtualization workloads such as Exchange. The All-Flash Shelf provides the flexibility to scale flash gradually up to 16TB per node, or 64TB in a 4-node scale-out cluster. These products are able to deliver performance by leveraging CASL, a CPU-driven architecture that eliminates the dependence on disk spindles.

Meeting Enterprise Demands: Intelligent Cloud-Based Analytics and HA
Organizations are forced to overprovision flash for performance-centric applications, incurring costs with overprovisioning and other overheads. Though performance-intensive applications benefit from residing on flash, enterprises are burdened with overheads associated with maintaining the entire working sets within a flash-only environment. The Adaptive Flash platform leverages InfoSight to recommend the exact amount of resources required as application demands change within an enterprise, while company’s scale-to-fit approach allows non-disruptive addition of resources, thus avoiding over provisioning, under-utilization, and increased costs.

Nimble provides greater than ‘Five-Nines’ (99.999%) level of system availability. Taking a ground-up approach, it built its software architecture, CASL, with design elements such as redundant hardware, no single points of failure, and non-disruptive upgrades – all of which address availability challenges. Furthermore, Nimble’s approach to storage lifecycle management, InfoSight, leverages data sciences to deliver storage health and operational efficiency.

The CS700 Series array and All-Flash Shelf will be available in June 2014.

“We pushed the Nimble CS700 array as hard as we possibly could, and we consistently achieved north of 125,000 IO/s with under 0.1ms latency across SQL workloads. We can easily see clustering the CS700 with our existing Nimble arrays for additional horsepower and consolidation of workloads,” said Brian Troudy, IT manager, Corona Norco Unified School District.

“The CS700 reinforces that we can rely on Nimble Storage for all of our critical applications, including several very large-scale Oracle OLTP databases. Across the bulk of our daily storage operations, we realized a 300% gain in performance over our previous storage system. Furthermore, Nimble snapshot technology has improved our data protection strategy by bringing our worst case RPO down to 7mn,” said Matt Foroughi, VP of SaaS operations, Airclic.

“The battle between all flash and hybrid flash array vendors will continue to rage for at least the next several years. Application workloads that require lots of performance and relatively little capacity will migrate more towards all flash array architectures, and those applications that require lots of capacity and relatively less performance will probably find hybrid array architectures more cost-effective. Solutions like Nimble’s new CS700 and All-Flash Shelf give customers significant leeway in establishing the ratio between SSDs and HDDs to offer the flexibility necessary to accommodate a wide range of mixed data center workloads,” said Eric Burgener, research director, IDC.

“Nimble’s innovative Adaptive Flash technology and VMware Horizon 6 will enable customers to extend the power of virtualization from the data center to devices, while maintaining central management of virtual, physical, and BYO Windows images through a single solution. This can enhance the user experience, help drive down costs, and deliver business agility and scaling flexibility,” said Courtney Burry, director, end-user computing, VMware, Inc.

“Today’s hybrid and flash-only products force enterprises to create storage silos, resulting in increased costs and management complexity. Our Adaptive Flash platform will demand the storage industry rethink the way flash can be leveraged within datacenter and cloud environments. We’ve built a solution that can span a larger set of workloads with more performance and cost efficiency than any other flash solution on the market,” said Dan Leary, VP of WW marketing, Nimble Storage.