Nimble Storage Launch: Predictive Flash Platform and All Flash Array

Nimble Storage have launched their all new Predictive Flash Platform and a next generation All Flash Array that in their own words will “leapfrog those already in the market” .

Those are bold words from CEO Suresh Vasudevan, yet it is easy to understand why Nimble feel as confident in their claims as they have. With a track record for innovation and disruption in the storage market place that has led Nimble Storage to become a real vendor to consider when trying to get the right balance between performance and cost to scale. As a company that in 2008 entered an already competitive field, Nimble latched onto the catalysts of change in flash and cloud based predictive analytics to develop a product that has seen Nimble Storage be the first new entry into Gartner’s leader’s magic quadrant for quite some time.

• Unified Flash Fabric – The Unified Flash Fabric combines industry-leading All-Flash Arrays and Adaptive Flash arrays into a single storage architecture that brings flash to every enterprise application and dramatically enhances performance while simultaneously lowering the total cost of storage ownership.

• InfoSight cloud-based predictive analytics – InfoSight monitors our customers’ infrastructure on a real-time basis from the cloud and leverages predictive analytics to predict and prevent the vast majority of infrastructure disruptions that can negatively impact applications.

• Timeless Storage – Timeless Storage is our approach to ensuring investment protection to customers that deploy our products. It includes an unwavering commitment to customer success and guarantees all-inclusive licensing, that we won’t increase support pricing in later years, and protection against product obsolescence or forklift upgrades in later years. It also provides the ability for our customers to procure storage as capex or leverage our storage-on-demand solutions to only pay for storage based on actual usage.

What will these 3 components achieve?

When you consider how important storage is to the modern application driven enterprise the new Predictive Flash Platform offers a level of availability and performance that is truly compelling.

TCO is reduced by a third as Nimble have implemented fundamental architectural advantages around optimizing the use of flash with disk.

Adaptive Flash arrays are not limited by the performance of disk and the number of disk spindles. This is because when writing to disk, Adaptive flash uses mirrored NVRAM to rapidly respond to the host and then we compress the data in DRAM  and coalesce thousands of small random blocks into large sequential stripes on disk.

Adaptive Flash arrays use a ground-up design that is optimized to use cost-effective MLC and 3D-NAND flash in the most efficient way possible.  Rather than performing storage tiering, which is inefficient and does not rapidly adapt to changing workloads, this uses Flash as a dynamic read cache, and does a really good job of this achieving 95%+ cache hit rate with only 5-10% flash capacity. By implementing advanced flash endurance management software and Nimbles write coalescing avoids write amplification on flash. This allows you to use cost-optimized 3D-NAND and still guarantee SSD lifespans of 7+ years.

Combined with Infosights proactive approach to identifying problems within the storage and access to 3rd level engineers Nimble offer a full level of service that has led to an amazing 99.9997% up time. The combination of high performance and ability to scale, whilst protecting the business from failure and it is easy to see why Nimble are in that magic quadrant and are disrupting the market share for the likes of NetApp and EMC.