Nimble Storage Intros Multi-Cloud Block Storage Service for AWS and Azure

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced Cloud Volumes, an enterprise-grade multi-cloud storage service for running applications in Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It will provide enterprise-grade availability and data services that have previously not been readily available in block storage for the cloud. These capabilities are necessary for moving the next wave of applications to the cloud – traditional transactional workloads – which place stringent requirements on storage.
 
Organizations are developing a cloud strategy to support various applications, each with different performance, reliability, and scalability requirements.

According to a recent report from Forrester Research, “Many enterprises are challenging the truism that public clouds are not for core business applications. Having had success using public cloud platforms for new applications built to engage with their customers (systems of engagement), a growing number of enterprise application development and delivery (AD&D) leaders want to bring the same benefits of fast delivery and iteration, high security, and cost flexibility to their core business applications.“
 
The first wave of applications moving to the cloud saw organizations implement native cloud applications, mostly web and mobile. Now a new wave is taking place in which organizations are starting to migrate test and development instances and even some production instances of traditional workloads – CRM, financial applications, and other business applications – to the cloud. These applications often control important transactional business processes, place far higher demands on storage, and depend on enterprise-grade availability and data services that are not provided by native cloud storage. These factors, along with a lack of data mobility and very limited visibility across clouds, have slowed enterprise cloud adoption for business applications.
 
Breaking Cloud Barriers: Enterprise-Grade Reliability and Features
Cloud Volumes is designed to combine the simplicity of a cloud service with the features and functionality enterprise applications need. IT can leverage public cloud for compute and Cloud Volumes for storage capacity. Cloud Volumes is managed with the same simplicity as native cloud storage, but provides the reliability and data durability enterprises expect. Data protection is flexible and cost effective, as customers only pay for changed data, not for additional full copies. IT will also be able to create instant zero-copy clones in the public cloud enabling rapid deployment of test and development, analytics and bursting.
 
Like the entire Nimble Predictive Cloud platform, Cloud Volumes is designed to deliver six nines (99.9999%) measured storage availability and offer data durability one million times greater than native cloud block storage.
 
Breaking Cloud Barriers: Data Mobility Eliminates Vendor Lock-in
Customers’ requirements are dynamic and they need the flexibility to evolve their multicloud data center without fear of lock-in. The built-in data mobility of Cloud Volumes will give customers the freedom to move data between multiple public clouds and on-premise data centers without large data egress charges.
 
Breaking Cloud Barriers:
Visibility Across Clouds and Data Center, and Predictive Analytics
Cloud Volumes include predictive analytics capabilities, providing customers with visibility into their data across multiple clouds. Customers can rapidly pinpoint and resolve performance issues, and can leverage insights that can help to optimize storage costs and data placement.
 
“With Cloud Volumes, enterprises can finally migrate critical applications to the cloud with complete confidence that they will have the same data durability and enterprise capabilites they have on-premise,” said Ajay Singh, VP of product management, Nimble Storage. “Enterprises maximize flexibility by using a multi-cloud storage service that allows mobility between public clouds and their data center. By using Cloud Volumes in conjunction with Nimble All Flash and Adaptive Flash arrays they take a major step in ensuring their data centers are cloud ready.”
 
“Cloud is a strategic priority in every organization today and IT teams are migrating their enterprise applications. Cloud Volumes provide enterprise storage features and ease of migration to minimize disruption,” said Nicole Herskowitz, senior director, product marketing, Microsoft Corp. “Enterprises are able to move faster, ac,ve more and save money with the combination of Microsoft Azure and Cloud Volumes.”
 
Cloud Volumes is currently in beta. There are 50 companies from a range of industries in the beta process – more than 40% of them are Global 5000 enterprises. Customer preview will commence within the current fiscal quarter in the United States. Nimble plans to make this service available to additional regions over the next 6 to 12 months. Cloud Volumes will start at $0.10/GB/month.

Pricing
(Additional Amazon Web Services and/or Microsoft Azure charges will apply)