Nimble Storage Flash Platform Predicts and Prevents Barriers to Data Velocity

Enterprises expect data to be available instantly, but complex infrastructure creates an app-data gap that disrupts data delivery and makes end users wait.

Preliminary findings of a Nimble primary research study reveal that 90% of US-based business users surveyed report experiencing application delays with nearly half experiencing delays at least three times each work day, and 80% reporting that delays impact their productivity. Closing the app-data gap requires predicting and preventing barriers to data velocity, no matter where the barriers occur across IT infrastructure.

Nimble Storage, Inc. closes the app-data gap with the firm’s Predictive Flash platform that combines InfoSight Predictive Analytics with a Unified Flash Fabric consolidation architecture to deliver flash performance for all enterprise applications and data velocity to end users.

“Enterprises are totally dependent on data to improve customer interaction, accelerate product development and run the back office. Immediate data access is critical to maintaining competitive edge. It’s clear that complex infrastructure creates an app-data gap that slows down data delivery which impacts critical business processes,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble. “The Predictive Flash Platform combines flash performance with predictive analytics to close the app-data gap even when the barriers to data velocity are not storage related. This translates to business and economic value for customers by accelerating business outcomes.“

The company continues to remove barriers to data velocity with game changing innovations evident in the all AF-Series All Flash arrays that are purpose-built to deliver performance, superior scalability and non-stop availability, at a TCO that is 33 to 66% lower than competitive arrays. However, fast flash alone is not enough to close the app-data gap given that more than 50% of barriers to data velocity take place outside of the storage architecture. InfoSight Predictive Analytics proactively predicts and prevents these issues by providing visibility across the entire application-to-storage stack. The Predictive Flash platform combines flash performance with InfoSight Predictive Analytics to deliver data velocity.

“Our design and product lifecycle management software is used by companies worldwide to design everything from golf clubs and smart phones, to automobiles and airplanes, and even to the latest NASA Mars Rover, Curiosity. In my department, our biggest challenge was keeping pace with increasing workload demands across our legacy software development and support infrastructure. With Nimble, our software development teams are now able to conduct deeper integrations and achieve faster iterations across testing and design automation environments than they’ve ever been able to accomplish before,” said Michael Landeck, principal infrastructure engineer, technical operations, Siemens PLM Software, a provider of product lifecycle management and manufacturing operations management software. “The value we realize with InfoSight is the ability to have a server-centric view of our IT environment. Predictive analytics gives us trend analysis on not only where we are today, but where we are going in the future. This enables us to predict and prevent downtime, which is very important to our efficiency.“

AF-Series All Flash array

Unified Flash Fabric makes flash data center a Reality
The Unified Flash Fabric enables flash for all enterprise applications by unifying All Flash and Adaptive Flash arrays into a single consolidation architecture with common data services.

All Flash arrays deliver performance for applications that require deterministic latency while Adaptive Flash hybrid arrays deliver optimized performance for mainstream applications. Since firm’s All Flash and Adaptive Flash arrays run the same NimbleOS, and management and functionality are identical, arrays can be seamlessly clustered and managed as a single entity.

Fast Flash is not enough: Predictive analytics and data science applied
InfoSight Predictive Analytics use big data science to correlate trillions of sensor data points, find the needle in the haystack, and solve some of the most complex issues facing IT organizations today. Even beyond storage, InfoSight predicts, diagnoses and prevents barriers to data velocity across all layers of the infrastructure stack.

By automatically detecting, and quickly diagnosing and resolving 9 out of 10 issues, both storage-related and non-storage, the Predictive Flash platform provides enterprises with measured availability of 99.9997%. For the small number of problems that require manual assistance, Level 3 experts have ‘pre-collected’ data at their fingertips to rapidly diagnose and resolve issues in real time. With this transformative customer support model, the firm has eliminated the traditional requirement for Level 1 and 2 support personnel. IT administrators save time and frustration by speaking directly with a Level 3 support engineer.

Timeless storage: Innovative business model
Timeless storage is an innovative new business model comprised of three elements spanning the trust and transparency of product claims, a proven ability to deliver leading support and an all-new Timeless Guarantee. The Timeless Guarantee provides investment protection and upgrade certainty, with an option to receive a free faster controller upgrade after three years. The Timeless Storage business model offers all-inclusive pricing with no-forklift upgrades and the flexibility to purchase storage as a capital investment or as a Storage on Demand service. With Storage on Demand, monthly payments are made in accordance with actual usage, whether it increases or decreases.

Inaugural net promoter survey yields score of 85
Customers appreciate the unwavering customer commitment and support they receive from the company. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the industry standard measure of overall customer satisfaction and serves as a leading indicator for future growth. In January 2016 the firm executed its inaugural NPS customer survey and earned a score of 85, reflecting an outstanding customer experience with Nimble products and support.

“As storage management becomes more complex, enterprises are demanding more from their storage systems in terms of performance, availability, agility and ease of use,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage, IDC. “Vendors like Nimble Storage and others have responded with features like flash-optimized architectures and predictive analytics to address evolving concerns, and customers are responding by not only driving high growth for these types of systems but also awarding them marks for customer satisfaction that are literally at least double the average earned by established storage vendors in the past.“