http://seditl.com/

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Nimble Storage, the leading provider of flash-optimized hybrid storage solutions, today announced NimbleConnect™, an online community where Nimble Storage customers, partners, and other IT professionals can access technical information, practical suggestions, and peer insights.

The community empowers members to maximize the value of their Nimble Storage data arrays, especially in conjunction with Nimble’s newInfoSight™ deep data analytics services. InfoSight is built on powerful analytics, systems modeling and intelligent, predictive algorithms, using the power of the cloud and deep data to simplify and streamline activities across the storage lifecycle. For example, virtual desktop users can garner best practices around sizing and configuring their environment to get the best performance and learn how others have resolved similar issues.

NimbleConnect has a robust search engine, and is packed with relevant content, including technical discussions, Q&As, how-to videos, blogs, and industry news. Contributions are welcome, and the community is actively moderated to help keep the conversation flowing in a useful and thoughtful way.

Today Nimble Storage, the leading provider of flash-optimized hybrid storage solutions, announced it has surpassed the 1,000-customer mark. The company has reached this milestone in less than two-and-a-half years of selling its products, due to the tremendous demand for its flash-optimized storage arrays. Nimble Storage products integrate the high performance of flash with the economics of high-capacity hard disk drives – making them ideal for storing and protecting data for critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, server virtualization and VDI. Nimble Storage’s scale-to fit technology provides complete flexibility for independently scaling capacity and performance at the lowest possible cost. Customers consistently see performance enhanced by up to a factor of ten, while Nimble Storage’s Proactive Wellness support capabilities provide increased storage uptime and keep arrays running at peak performance and efficiency….

http://goo.gl/k7Wno

This is part one of a two-part blog on snapshots.

In the storage world, snapshots are a point-in-time copy of data. They have been around for some time and are increasingly being used by IT to protect stored data. This post recalls some of the popular Nimble Storage blog posts on snapshots. But before I jump into the list of blogs, let me quickly walk you through the different types of storage-based snapshots, including their attributes.

A snapshot copies the metadata (think index) of the data instead of copying the data itself. This means taking a snapshot is almost always instantaneous. This is one of the primary advantages of storage-based snapshots—they eliminate backup windows. In traditional backup deployments, applications either have to be taken off-line or suffer from degraded performance during backups (which is why traditional backups typically happen during off-peak hours)….

http://goo.gl/jc1zR

I have recently spoken to a number of prospective customers who are evaluating new storage solutions (emerging storage vendors that are building flash enabled storage arrays) – what I find (not to my surprise), is that a good number of vendors are touting ambiguous/misleading marketing claims.  If you are evaluating storage solutions out there, be sure to challenge and validate the vendor’s claims….

http://goo.gl/TsKD2

Nimble engineers(Jay Wang, Anagha Barve, Sathya Bhat, Scott Moreland) and tech marketing strike again with part II of VSS.  Now that you have basic understanding of how VSS framework and VMware quiesced snapshot integration work (if you haven’t read the first post, click here).  Now let’s jump into the subject of design considerations – for those of you that read my blog regularly, you  know this is my favorite subject – highlighting areas of that you should watch out for, when designing your virtualization infrastructure.  Here we go, for each disk attachment method available in ESX environment….

http://goo.gl/b8fjH

We have gotten lots of customer inquiries in learning more about VMDK vs. RDM vs. in-guest attached iSCSI storage, and its implication on data protection with Microsoft VSS framework/integration. Instead of telling you what to do directly, I decided to work with our engineering gurus (Jay Wang, Anagha Barve, Sathya Bhat and Scott Moreland) who think about this day in and day out, to do a joint two part post on how VSS works, follow by design considerations….

http://goo.gl/Fg0IA

Nimble Storage Technologist Wen Yu and VMware Engineer Alton Yu provide a technical look at backup and recovery for VMware environments using Microsoft VSS.

Technical marketing engineer Michael McLaughlin describes the VDI reference architecture recently announced by Cisco, VMware, and Nimble Storage that supports 1,000 virtual desktops with only 3U of storage. The architecture uses Cisco UCS blade servers, VMware View, and VMware vSphere to provide a tested and preconfigured architecture for organizations looking to reduce their risk when deploying a VDI solution.

Jeff Winter, IS Director for the City of Hot Springs and Garland County, describes how his team virtualized their critical applications and established a replicated data protection scheme using Nimble Storage.