Nimble Storage Advances Adaptive Flash Platform
Nimble Storage today announced the availability of Fibre Channel protocol support for the CS-series arrays. The Nimble Adaptive Flash platform, the preferred 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. Today's announcement marks a significant milestone, enabling Nimble to effectively address enterprise-wide storage requirements and quadruple the addressable market the company is now able to serve.
With today's announcement, Nimble also introduced significant expansion of the scalability limits for its CS-series array clusters. Leveraging a combination of increased shelf count, denser Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and denser Solid State Drives (SSDs), Nimble now enables enterprises to scale non-disruptively to over 1.6PBs of raw capacity and over 160TBs of flash per cluster to handle very large datasets while maintaining the highest levels of responsiveness.
Enterprises are under pressure to keep pace with increasing user expectations and place a premium on maintaining service level agreements (SLA) and achieving peak workload performance. To maintain compliance with SLAs, enterprise IT organizations have provisioned storage in alignment with the unique performance and capacity requirements of individual workloads, exacerbating storage silo sprawl, increasing cost and complexity and exposing the business to risk. The Nimble Adaptive Flash platform addresses this challenge by effectively consolidating enterprise workloads onto a single storage array. Nimble's unique scale-to-fit architecture is purpose-built to scale storage performance and capacity in line with workload requirements and InfoSight, the company's powerful and intuitive cloud-based management and analytics engine, provides the proactive insight required to scale application environments in an informed, intelligent manner.
The recently introduced Nimble CS300, CS500 and CS700 series arrays now offer both iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocol support. To effectively test and validate the expanded protocol support in real world environments, Nimble initiated and completed a formal beta program with more than 40 enterprises which resulted in customers purchasing and deploying Fibre Channel-based arrays in production environments. Customers reported high levels of satisfaction with the ease of deployment and ability to consolidate a broad range of enterprise applications and workloads, all within a single efficient and compact platform.
Nimble has worked closely with its partner ecosystem, including Brocade, Emulex and QLogic, to enable enterprises to leverage the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform across a range of network connectivity configurations. As Nimble expands its reach into the enterprise, fortifying relationships with industry leaders that are favored by enterprises will be critical to the company's long-term success.
"Gen 5 Fibre Channel 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 Fibre Channel arrays, running on Brocade SAN fabrics, provides enterprise IT with confidence to consolidate their storage without compromising performance, availability and reliability," said Jack Rondoni, vice president, Storage Networking at Brocade.
