Chris Haynes [Sr. Systems Consultant]
Are your storage costs getting out of control? Do you need more storage performance, but think you can’t afford it? Are you contemplating that support renewal vs. a storage refresh decision? Well, then you need to consider Nimble Storage.
So how is Nimble Storage different from all the other storage providers? Nimble designed their solution from the ground up, to take advantage of using SSDs as cache in combination with traditional spinning disks to provide the most efficient hybrid solution at the lowest price/performance combo available in a storage solution today.
Nimble developed their patented Operating System called Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) to cache “hot” data on SSDs in real time, allowing it to respond to read requests much faster than any of its competitor’s “bolted-on” flash technology. CASL also allows for some of the lowest-latency writes too, by collecting random writes and compressing and writing them to disk sequentially.
Nimble Storage didn’t stop with just a low-cost, high-performance system either. They packed their storage solution with all the advanced features one would expect in a next-generation storage solution, including inline compression, block level difference snapshots, zero copy clones, data replication, one-click upgrades with no downtime, and much more, all included at no extra cost. No a la carte pricing like some other storage vendors have.
On top of all this, they provide one of the easiest and most intuitive management interfaces, with all the capacity and performance data you need at your fingertips, and a convenient plug-in for VMware vCenter or Microsoft Hyper-V, so you don’t have to leave your hypervisor to create, resize, & monitor your datastores.
What else? Nimble Storage also provides a proactive support site called InfoSight, which is a cloud-based portal that collects data from your storage solution every five minutes, and presents historical capacity and performance reports, trending and wellness reports, and hardware upgrade recommendations, along with lots of other information. You can manage support tickets here as well, and if you have to call Support, the person who answers the phone will be able to help you immediately, never asking you to collect logs to send to them. Support will already have all the data they need to help you.
Will it scale? Absolutely. You can scale up on the fly with hot swappable controllers, SSDs, and HDDs and scale out by clustering multiple Nimble Storage units together for even the largest environments. All systems are highly available dual controller solutions with high-performance SSDs and RAID-6 triple parity disk arrays for the HDDs for maximum redundancy and performance.
Nimble Storage was named “Storage Vendor of the Year” in 2014 by CRN and has had quicker growth than any other storage vendor to date. All sound too good to be true? Do your own research. Ask around. Then give Keller Schroeder a call. We’ll answer any other questions you have about Nimble storage, provide references, and can schedule a demo with you. We can even arrange to have a demo unit installed at your site. Give Nimble Storage a look. You’ll be glad you did.
Contact your Account Manager at Keller Schroeder for more information about these products and how they might benefit your organization.
