Nimble Updates Adaptive Flash Platform With Several New Benefits

by Adam Armstrong July 17, 2015

written by Adam Armstrong July 17, 2015

Nimble Storage has announced that it has made updated its Adaptive Flash Platform (NAF) giving it several enterprise-grade capabilities. This advancements include the ability to deliver an all-flash service level, an auto-flash service level, and a disk only service level all within a single storage platform. Nimble also announced it added additional capabilities including software-based encryption and a REST API-based extensibility framework. These new advancements are aimed at enabling organizations to dynamically meet varying service level agreements, reduce costs, and gain greater business agility and responsiveness.

Hundreds of business applications are created with varying needs. Some need more capacity, other need speed and responsiveness, and just about all need to be more cost-effective. One solution has been to run the different applications in different storage silos. However this can lead to a different set of issues such as lack of flexibility. Nimble’s Adaptive Flash Platform introduces different levels that cater to the needs of each application while consolidating everything down into a single storage architecture.

Nimble enables IT to deliver all-flash service levels to mission-critical applications that need high performance and low latency without the cost of using all-flash arrays. Not only will it give applications the performance and responsiveness they need, service levels can be changed on the fly so the service levels can match the demand of the application and business needs over time. This will enable IT to be more productive at a lower cost without compromising performance.

Nimble’s software based encryption, SmartSecure, gives administrators the ability to enable data encryption in consolidation and multi-tenant storage environments at no additional cost, nor does it require custom drivers or dedicated firmware to implement. Administrators can now enable both encryption and shredding on a per-application or per-array level. Data is compressed and encrypted, then replicated to a secure site with the target site understanding the encryption key. Administrators can use SmartSecure to isolate and encrypt a particular client’s data as well.

Other benefits include:

Expanded Management Capabilities Improve Productivity – with the addition of REST API’s, administrators can now build customized reporting and workflows, which will simplify integration into existing frameworks and increase IT productivity.
Enhanced Non-disruptive Scalability of Performance and Capacity – NAF enables separate, non-disruptive scaling of compute and storage with new capacities running up to 3.5PB with over 160TB of flash per cluster.
Identify and Address Virtual Machine Performance Issues Quickly and Efficiently – administrators have granular insight into VM, network, and LUN latencies through Nimble’s cloud-connected management and support engine, InfoSight. Administrators will be able to quickly identify and resolve issues, maintaining service level agreements. InfoSight now has a new per-VM monitoring feature, InfoSight-VMVision. Using InfoSight-VMVision administrators and pinpoint problem VMs that are using more than their share of resources, and then tune performance and eliminate bottlenecks.
Integrated Data Protection – Nimble offers a fully integrated data protection package for primary storage, backup, and disaster recovery. Nimble’s data protection enables snapshots that can be housed on the same array as production data assuring instantaneous data recovery.

Availability

The new advancements on Nimble Storage’s Adaptive Flash Platform are available now.

Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Platform

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