Nimble Storage Introducing Scale-to-Fit Storage Architecture

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced a scale-to-fit storage architecture that enables enterprises to scale the capacity and performance of their storage arrays individually according to their needs and budgets, and as their storage requirements evolve.

Today’s scale-up storage architectures are inflexible, requiring upfront forecasting of performance needs over an array’s three-to-five-year lifespan and creating separate storage silos that complicate management. Scale-out cluster solutions provide upfront flexibility, but tie performance and capacity together, requiring customers to incur higher incremental costs every time they add a storage node.

Nimble Storage addresses these challenges by allowing customers to purchase exactly what they need up front and by providing flexible scaling options. Customers can thus protect their existing investments while growing their storage at the lowest incremental cost without downtime as their needs evolve.

Nimble Storage offers
three flexible paths for scaling:

• Scale capacity only: a new line of ES-Series storage expansion shelves allows customers who do not require additional performance to add capacity at the lowest incremental cost without downtime.
• Scale performance only: a new line of performance CS400 series arrays are for customers running performance-intensive applications such as OLTP and VDI. Existing CS200 series array controllers can be non-disruptively upgraded to CS400 arrays without downtime. Customers can also upgrade to higher-capacity flash SSDs without downtime to accommodate workloads with larger active data sets.
• Scale capacity and performance: a new OS upgrade, Nimble OS 2.0, allows customers to cluster arrays together, providing linear scaling of both capacity and performance, as well as unified management. Nimble scale-out clustering allows users to grow or shrink their storage environments, and to perform data migrations and upgrades, all without downtime.

Enterprises can mix and match these approaches to scale to hundreds of terabytes and hundreds of thousands of IOPS in a single storage cluster.

"Traditional scale-up systems and more modern scale-out systems are rooted in an era when storage capacity and storage performance were tethered together," said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage. "Our scale-to-fit architecture delivers an unparalleled ability to independently scale the controller performance, cache capacity or storage capacity of any node while also allowing multiple nodes to become part of a cluster. Starting with a small footprint, our customers can continually and non-disruptively scale and evolve their infrastructure in small, granular increments across the widest range of workloads."

Nimble’s scale-to-fit technology is built on the Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout Architecture (CASL). CASL is architected from to leverage flash and high-capacity disk to deliver performance and capacity. In addition, It delivers snapshots and WAN-efficient replication, simplifying backups and DR. Operation of the arrays is simplified across their lifecycle through application integration as well as proactive wellness and management.

"Enterprise storage requirements are continually and rapidly in flux," said Roger Cox, research VP at Gartner. "Consolidation of diverse workloads means that higher demands are placed on storage. Because most enterprises can’t predict their storage requirements even one year down the road, they need assurance of elastic performance and capacity in their storage platforms."

Scale-out clustering with Nimble Storage allows enterprises to size their storage to current requirements, eliminate the need to forecast future requirements and eliminate storage silos:

• Scale performance and capacity linearly with the addition of new arrays
• Automatically ‘stripe’ storage volumes across multiple arrays in a cluster
• Create storage pools in a cluster to segment applications and workloads on different arrays
• Migrate data non-disruptively across pools in a cluster
• Add arrays to a cluster or remove them with full, uninterrupted data access. The OS automatically redistributes data across arrays in the cluster.

Furthermore, scale out is compatible with all existing and new Nimble Storage arrays, and any arrays can be mixed and matched within a scale-out cluster. The company makes scale out available at no cost to all customers with current service and support contracts.

"With the expansion of our operations, it was imperative that we build a storage architecture that could scale performance and capacity to accommodate staff additions, significant growth in our data and a range of new applications, including VDI," said Derek Schostag, systems engineer, Lindquist & Vennum PLLP, a business-oriented general-practice law firm. "With Nimble Storage we have achieved that objective, and we’re extremely confident of investment protection, even for scenarios that we can’t envision today. No other storage provider can give us that confidence."

CS400 Series Performance Arrays
Nimble’s new performance CS400 arrays are designed to host an enterprise’s most demanding applications and workloads, supporting hundreds of virtual machines or thousands of VDI users on each array.

"Nimble’s CS400 provides a single storage server that can meet the requirements of virtualization on a large scale, allowing enterprises to support their core applications, workloads and users, while also providing room to grow," said Raj Mallempati, director of product marketing, VMware. "End users using VMware View solutions are looking for uncompromising performance at scale. Nimble CS400 and VMware View provide a high-performance, scalable desktop-virtualization solution that can meet the ever-growing capacity requirements of enterprise users."

Availability
The CS400 series arrays, ES-Series expansion shelves and flash expansion options will be available in the third quarter of 2012. Nimble OS 2.0, which supports scale-out clustering, will be available in the fourth quarter of 2012.