FC Protocol for Nimble Storage Flash Platform

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced the availability of FC protocol support for the CS-series arrays. 

The Nimble Adaptive Flash platform, the choice for over 4,000 customers worldwide, empowers IT organizations to predict, manage and deliver the storage required to optimize business applications and workloads across the enterprise. 

This announcement enables to address enterprise-wide storage requirements and quadruple the addressable market the company is now able to serve.

Nimble also introduced expansion of the scalability limits for its CS-series array clusters. Leveraging a combination of increased shelf count, denser HDDs and denser SSDs, Nimble now enables enterprises to scale non-disruptively to over 1.6PB of raw capacity and over 160TB of flash per cluster to handle large datasets while maintaining high level of responsiveness. 

Enterprises are under pressure to keep pace with increasing user expectations and place a premium on maintaining SLAs and achieving peak workload performance. To maintain compliance with SLAs, enterprise IT organizations have provisioned storage in alignment with the performance and capacity requirements of individual workloads, exacerbating storage silo sprawl, increasing cost and complexity and exposing the business to risk. 

The Adaptive Flash platform addresses this challenge by consolidating enterprise workloads onto a single storage array. Scale-to-fit architecture is purpose-built to scale storage performance and capacity in line with workload requirements and InfoSight, the company’s cloud-based management and analytics engine, provides the proactive insight required to scale application environments in an informed, intelligent manner.

Customers Deploy Nimble FC-Based Arrays 
The recently introduced CS300, CS500 and CS700 series arrays now offer both iSCSI and FC protocol support. To test and validate the expanded protocol support in real world environments, the company initiated and completed a formal beta program with more than 40 enterprises which resulted in customers purchasing and deploying FC-based arrays in production environments. Customers reported high levels of satisfaction with the ease of deployment and ability to consolidate a range of enterprise applications and workloads, all within a single compact platform. 

Power Integrations Consolidates Oracle and Virtual Servers Onto Nimble Array
For Power Integrations, Inc., a supplier of high-voltage ICs designed for energy-efficient power supplies, FC-enabled arrays offer a faster path to consolidating the company’s mix of business-critical applications, including Oracle and virtual servers, off its legacy storage infrastructure. 

“Not only did Nimble deliver the additional performance demanded by our VM environment, we were able to set it up in a third of the time we spent setting up our current storage,” said senior systems architect Jaime Huizar. “We are really impressed with how smoothly we were able to deploy the FC-enabled Nimble array – the discovery, the configuration of the array… I still don’t understand how Nimble made it so easy.”

LANDesk Reduces Datacenter Footprint and Obtains All-Flash Performance
With a forlklift upgrade of LANDesk Software‘s legacy storage infrastructure looming, senior system administrator Jeremy Balter sought out a new, rapidly deployable high-performance storage system that offered greater longevity.

“We replaced half a rack of our previous storage with only 9U of Nimble,” said Balter. “Frankly, I’ve never seen any other vendor deliver the kind of performance that Nimble does with the same set of hardware. We were seeing all-flash performance without the corresponding expense. Furthermore, Nimble removes all of the complexity from the configuration process, and our FC array was fully operational in very little time.“

Terra Experiences 4x Performance Increase Over Previous Storage
For Terra, Australia’s wholesale cloud/IaaS provider, providing high performance and reliable storage is critical. Having made a significant investment in 16Gb FC infrastructure, Rob Georgievski, Terra’s co-founder and principal director, found Nimble’s new FC-enabled arrays to be a fit: “In conjunction with our integration partner, Genisys, the implementation of Nimble into our FC environment was extremely smooth, and the array has surpassed our expectations. This has been the most efficient experience we’ve had deploying a new storage array. Nimble has delivered over 4x performance improvement over our previous storage. We are proud to say that customers hosted in our cloud environment have enjoyed a measured 80% reduction in processing times on SQL workloads and an enhanced user experience within Citrix deployments as a result of the Nimble array.”

Siemens Company eMeter, Depends on Nimble’s Ease of Use
Bryan Bond, senior systems administrator responsible for datacenter operations and virtualization infrastructure at eMeter, a Siemens company that develops market-leading meter data management software, has long-standing experience deploying Nimble.: “We deployed one of the first Nimble Storage CS700 arrays back in June 2014. It was an incredibly easy configuration back then, and we were able to stand up the new FC-enabled array with identical ease.“

FC Integration Enables Cosentry to Support Large SQL Databases
Kevin Kumpf, who leads the virtualization and storage team at Cosentry, Inc., provider of Midwest data center solutions, was seeing a surge in demand for FC storage systems in support of the frequent bursts of random IO inherent to large deployments of MS-SQL databases: “Given the great experience we’ve had with Nimble Storage, we jumped on the chance to deploy their new FC-enabled arrays. We were really impressed to see such a deep level of FC integration, coupled with the exact same intuitive and rapid configuration experience we’ve come to know with Nimble.” 

Nimble Provides Enterprises with Choice through its Partner Ecosystem 
The company has worked with its partner ecosystem, including Brocade, Emulex and QLogic, to enable enterprises to leverage the

Adaptive Flash platform across a range of network connectivity configurations. As Nimble expands its reach into the enterprise, fortifying relationships with compa,ies that are favored by enterprises will be critical to the company’s success. 

“Gen 5 FC is a foundational technology for flash-based storage solutions. Enterprises are faced with many challenges to consolidate and simplify their IT resources. The new Nimble FC arrays, running on Brocade SAN fabrics, provides enterprise IT with confidence to consolidate their storage without compromising performance, availability and reliability,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, storage networking, Brocade Communication Systems, Inc. 

“Enterprises rely on Emulex to support business-critical applications like Oracle and in-memory databases such as SAP Hana and NoSQL,” said Shaun Walsh, SVP marketing, Emulex Corp. “The undeniable performance benefits of flash storage is helping drive increased mixed workloads, including virtualization, cloud computing and VDI. By expanding the reach of Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform to FC environments, enterprises will be better equipped to consolidate these various workloads on a single platform.” 

“FC continues to be the preferred technology for storage connectivity in the enterprise, based on its ubiquity, performance and reliability,” said Vikram Karvat, VP of products, marketing and planning, QLogic Corp. “QLogic is the end-to-end brand of choice in FC implementations, and we are pleased to be collaborating with Nimble Storage as they enable FC connectivity on their CS-series arrays. Fully compatible with QLogic HBAs, the CS-series arrays are well-equipped to deliver superior performance at an exceptional value.” 

“Enterprise customers continue to adopt our flash solutions over incumbent vendors because our consolidation platform will adapt to meet the needs of growing workloads without disruption. By expanding the connectivity choice, we are now able to address enterprise-wide applications and workloads. Adding FC protocol support dramatically expands our addressable market and ability to serve large enterprise and cloud service provider customers,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble.

“Nimble has been moving steadily upmarket, by extending its portfolio with new, larger and more powerful systems. Adding FC support is an important part of this progression, and will open more doors for Nimble by increasing the flexibility and appeal of its products to large enterprises and service providers – for whom FC is the dominant and fastest growing form of storage networking,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451Research.

“As a National solutions provider, CDW relies on partners, like Nimble Storage, to build products that meet our customers’ needs. With Nimble’s addition of FC to its portfolio validates its efforts to provide robust data solutions to meet the evolving needs of customers. The company’s flash storage solutions have already garnered a high confidence level due to their performance and efficiency benefits, this insertion of FC furthers their ability to service a more diverse customer set, said Matthew Soroka, director data center solutions, CDW LLC.