Nimble Storage With Utility-Based Storage on Demand Pricing Model

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced flexible pricing and deployment models for enterprises and service providers managing storage in cloud environments.

Nimble’s Storage on Demand, a pay-as-you-go offering, is a true utility-based model that eliminates archaic long-term commitments by delivering service levels based on actual requirements and usage versus pre-defined hardware configurations.

In addition, organizations building private or public clouds leveraging OpenStack can realize the value of Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform to predict, manage and deliver the storage required to optimize business applications and workloads across their IT environments.

With these pricing and deployment models, the ccompany is providing enterprises and service providers with high level of choice and control over their storage infrastructure within cloud environments.

The economics associated with acquiring storage in cloud environments have historically been rigid and costly for customers yet lucrative for storage vendors. Customers typically pay up-front with capital expenditures or long-term leases and wind up paying a premium for unused storage while incurring incremental expenditures to increase storage capacity and performance as requirements change over time. Unlike competitive ‘on-demand’ storage offerings designed to lock-in customers with multi-year subscription contracts that include fixed costs and configurations, Storage on Demand utility pricing model is based on the customer’s actual usage. By leveraging InfoSight, Nimble’s cloud-based management and support engine, cloud operators can manage and monitor storage and service levels from a single Web browser thereby eliminating the guesswork associated with storage management.

Storage on Demand customers select from one of four service level performance tiers, from Platinum to capacity-optimized Bronze, and are billed monthly on an economical cents/GB basis for actual usage. Data analytics from InfoSight are used to ensure that customers always have enough performance and buffer to maintain service levels. Nimble ships additional performance or capacity to a customer, before it is needed, and at no additional cost to the customer. Monthly billing amounts increase or decrease based on actual usage.

“Xtium leverages Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform to deliver cost-effective managed cloud hosting and DR solutions with high levels of redundancy and reliability,” said Tim Vogel, CTO, Xtium, Inc. “The Nimble Storage on Demand purchasing model allows us to pay a monthly subscription, eliminating the onerous lock-ins of a regular purchase or lease. With more than 1 PB of Xtium’s data footprint flowing through Nimble Storage, the on-demand model gives us the financial flexibility to continue developing solutions with increased service levels for our end-users.“

Adaptive Flash Platform integrates with OpenStack cloud platform
Nimble Storage integrates with OpenStack, providing support for OpenStack Cinder storage, Nova compute, and Glance image repository services for private and public cloud environments. This frees organizations to build OpenStack-based clouds that support a range of application workloads and performance profiles on a single storage array. By integrating Nimble’s built-in snapshots and zero-copy cloning with OpenStack, organizations are able to stand up test and development environments without performance or capacity overhead. Integration with OpenStack will help customers reduce cloud implementation times, free up dev-ops resources, deliver flexible and secure storage environments and ensure reliability.

“The Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform provides us with all the flexibility and performance we require in a very small data center footprint,” said Takuya Ito, senior manager, Yahoo! Japan Corporation. “By utilizing Nimble’s OpenStack Cinder driver we have been able to leverage Nimble’s advanced functionality including the creation and provisioning of space efficient snapshots and volume clones.“

Nimble provided technology deep dive at Storage Field day 6, November 7th.
Nimble provided the delegates attending Storage Field day 6 with a technical deep dive on these new cloud integration models. The presentations and demos included in-depth hands-on interaction with Nimble’s OpenStack deployment model and new features in InfoSight. The presentations were streamed live and stored on the Storage Field Day website.

“Storage on Demand provides enterprises and service providers with a flexible, efficient and high-performance solution that enables them to build and leverage the benefits and cost-savings of the cloud,” said Gavin Cohen, senior director of strategy and market development, Nimble Storage. “Long-term contracts leave customers with obsolete technology and empty wallets. We want customers to have the peace-of-mind in knowing that they are only paying for what they use and can grow and shrink capacity at any time as their business requirements change.“