Latest Nimble Storage Array Combines Flash Performance With HDD Capacity

Flash-optimized storage provider Nimble Storage launched a new Adaptive Flash platform, which aims to combine the performance of flash-only arrays and the capacity of hybrid arrays, dynamically and intelligently allocating storage resources to meet diverse and stringent application demands on a single platform. The new platform also introduces the CS700 Series arrays and All-Flash Shelf to deliver up to 500,000 IOPS, 64 terabytes of flash and a petabyte of capacity.

Built on Nimble’s patented Cache-Accelerated Sequential Layout architecture the Adaptive Flash platform is engineered for performance and has integrated data protection and predictive support to seamlessly scale storage infrastructures. Also built into the platform is Infosight, the company's automated cloud-based management and support system, which will recommend the exact amount of resources required as application demands change within an enterprise.

The rising adoption of all-flash storage has been leveraged with the price-performance argument that changes the economic discussion from raw capacity to dollars per IOP. Modern IT requirements and the need to both reduce latency and increase performance have all-flash arrays balancing a changing workload of I/O profiles and service levels.

San Jose, California-based Nimble went public late last year among a flurry of other storage-related funding announcements and IPOs from rivals Violin Memory, Fusion-io and Pure Storage. Outside of these smaller vendors, incumbents like EMC have purchased rack-scale flash startup DSSD, and HP recently pushed down the cost of its all-flash 3PAR arrays. Nimble has done quite well since its IPO, with more than 1,200 customers deploying its scale-out storage architecture and more than 200 enterprise customers implementing its SmartStack converged infrastructure solution.

“The battle between all-flash and hybrid flash array vendors will continue to rage for at least the next several years," said Eric Burgener, research director at IDC. "Application workloads that require lots of performance and relatively little capacity will migrate more towards all-flash array architectures, and those applications that require lots of capacity and relatively less performance will probably find hybrid array architectures more cost-effective. Solutions like Nimble's new CS700 and All-Flash Shelf give customers significant leeway in establishing the ratio between SSDs and HDDs to offer the flexibility necessary to accommodate a wide range of mixed data center workloads.”

Nimble says the new CS700 Series array can handle a variety of performance-intensive enterprise workloads, such as large-scale VDI deployments and high transaction-volume databases, as well as other performance-intensive server virtualization workloads, such as Microsoft Exchange.  The new All-Flash Shelf provides the flexibility to scale flash gradually up to 16 TB per node or 64 TB in a 4-node scale-out cluster.