Nimble Storage Unveils Predictive All Flash Arrays

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced a series of Predictive All Flash arrays, combining fast flash performance with InfoSight Predictive Analytics to deliver data velocity.

The AF-Series All Flash arrays deliver performance, superior scalability and non-stop availability, at a TCO that is up to 33 to 66% lower than competitive arrays. With the addition of the AF-Series to the firm’s Predictive Flash platform portfolio, the company provides enterprise IT organizations with a single consolidation architecture to accelerate, protect and scale all enterprise applications and deliver data velocity to end users..

“Our all flash array delivers absolute speed for performance sensitive applications and workloads. It accelerates, scales, and delivers lower TCO than competing all flash arrays,” said Ajay Singh, VP, product management, Nimble. “Our engineers are so confident in the readiness of our all flash arrays that we’ve been powering core Nimble production engineering infrastructure services on an AF7000 array for several weeks and have experienced flawless service.“

“Our IT organization deployed the Nimble All Flash array to support increased performance for our SQL database. We have teams that generate hundreds of reports that can take hours to run on our legacy storage. The performance of our SQL database increased by an order of magnitude with the Nimble AF7000 array, compared to our legacy tiered storage system. SQL database queries increased from 800 a second to 12,000 a second, and a report that took approximately one hour now runs in three minutes,” said Sal DiRosa, senior systems engineer, Lender Live Network, Inc, a Colorado-based mortgage services provider. “Due to the criticality of application responsiveness, we’re looking for a storage platform to exhibit not just increased performance, but also consistent low latency, so that we can meet our SLAs for end users, including banks and lenders. The Nimble All Flash array has exceeded our expectations.”

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Performance with scalability
The AF-Series All Flash arrays deliver the performance, scalability and consistent low latency required to power the all flash data center. The AF9000 All Flash array delivers performance of up to 350,000 IO/s at sub-millisecond latency and scales effective capacity to over 2PB in 12U, higher in comparison to competitive all flash arrays. Further, in scale-out four-node cluster configurations, the AF9000 can non-disruptively and independently scale performance up to 1.2 million IO/s and effective capacity to over 8PB, an order of magnitude greater than competitive all flash arrays. AF-Series arrays are application optimized and support a range of industry leading enterprise applications to ease deployment and simplify management.

“Our Nimble Adaptive Flash platform performs extremely well across mixed workloads; when we added the Nimble AF7000 All Flash array, the performance we gained greatly exceeded our expectations, as well as the expectations of our customers. The speed of our Nimble All Flash array will undoubtedly be a transformative aspect of our business in the near-term,” said Joshua Henderson, CTO, Clearview International LLC.

Management
AF-Series All Flash arrays are pre-configured and optimized to support enterprise applications and workloads right out of the box, effectively eliminating time consuming tasks like selecting RAID-level, media layout, aggregations and reserves. Initial configuration and set-up can be completed in less than 120mn. And with InfoSight VMVision and VMware, Inc.’ vVols, IT administrators can manage and monitor the storage at VM-level granularity.

Up to 33 to 66% lower TCO than competing all flash arrays
Game changing architectural innovation makes this dramatic savings possible:

Unconstrained by memory: The AF-Series utilizes 10-30X less memory than competing all flash arrays by providing memory-efficient metadata to deliver unparalleled flash scalability and lower per array cost, while also reducing the total number of controllers required.
Engineered for 3D V-NAND: The AF-Series supports the cost-effective 3D V-NAND innovations of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. ‘ PM863 series SSDs, and uses advanced flash endurance management and integrated hot sparing to extend flash lifespan to seven years, while providing 20% more usable capacity, all at half the footprint and cost of competing eMLC-based all flash arrays.
Comprehensive data protection: With inline variable block deduplication and compression, and zero pattern elimination, the AF-Series delivers up to a 5X capacity savings. And with thin provisioning and zero copy clones the savings increase even further.
Backup, DR and archival at one-third the cost: As cost-optimized firm’s Adaptive Flash (hybrid) arrays run the same release of NimbleOS, they can be leveraged to address secondary storage requirements at a fraction of the cost of backing up to all flash. With identical functionality and a common user experience both AF and CS Series arrays integrate seamlessly under the Unified Flash Fabric single consolidation architecture.

Absolute resiliency with non-stop availability
From inception company’s arrays were designed for 6 ‘9’s’, with 99.9997% measured uptime across the entire installed base through InfoSight Predictive Analytics and no single point of failure.

Triple+parity RAID: The AF-Series has been engineered to sustain up to three simultaneous SSD failures plus an additional layer of protection from intra-drive parity and integrated hot sparing.
SmartSecure software-based FIPS compliant encryption: With array level and application-granular encryption and secure data shredding, IT organizations can meet the most stringent data security mandates with flexibility and ease.
Integrated data protection: backup data continuously and recover quickly with application snapshots and replication using SmartSnap and SmartReplicate.

“Nimble is maximizing the potential cost-effective 3D V-NAND making all-flash storage more affordable, and ultimately more accessible,” said Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “With the combination of affordable NAND technology, a scale-out architecture, and differentiated software resiliency features, such as Triple+ Parity RAID, Nimble is delivering not only HA and scalable performance, by reducing TCO as well. When combined with the power of InfoSight Predictive Analytics, the end result is a very compelling package.“

“We pride ourselves on delivering advanced, reliable and secure global cloud services with predictable high performance and encryption. Though we’ve been able to provide all-flash performance by pinning workloads into flash on the Nimble Adaptive Flash arrays, we have customers that request their applications and data are supported by an all flash array. The performance of the Nimble All Flash array has proven to be impressive in our experience – running close to 300,000 IO/s the latency is 0.2 milliseconds on the AF7000. That is ridiculously fast,” said Justin Giardina, CTO, iland Internet Solutions Corporation. “With the addition of the all flash array to the Nimble portfolio, we’re able meet SLAs while continuing to manage a single storage platform on the back-end. This provides an incredibly streamlined management process for our administrators who have already mastered NimbleOS.“

The AF-Series All Flash arrays will be offered in four models: AF3000, AF5000, AF7000 and AF9000, and is available to order.

Webinar: Fast Forward to the All Flash Data Center, with Howard Marks