Nimble Storage releases Fibre Channel Storage Arrays

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 organisations 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.

Customers Successfully Deploy Nimble Fibre Channel-based Arrays
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 programme 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.

Power Integrations Consolidates Oracle and Virtual Servers onto Nimble Array
For Power Integrations, a leading supplier of high-voltage ICs designed for energy-efficient power supplies, Nimble’s new Fibre Channel-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 Fibre Channel-enabled Nimble array-- the discovery, the configuration of the array... I still don’t understand how Nimble made it so easy!”

LANDesk Reduces Data Centre Footprint and Obtains All-flash Performance
With a forlklift upgrade of LANDesk’s legacy storage infrastructure looming, senior system administrator Jeremy Balter sought out a new, rapidly deployable high-performance storage system that offered much 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 Fibre Channel array was fully operational in very little time.”

A Siemens Company, eMeter, Depends on Nimble’s Proven Ease of Use
Bryan Bond, senior systems administrator responsible for data centre operations and virtualisation Infrastructure at eMeter, a Siemens company that develops market-leading meter data management software, has long-standing experience deploying Nimble Storage. “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 Fibre Channel-enabled array with identical ease.”

Nimble Provides Enterprises with Choice through its Partner Ecosystem
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.

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

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