Posts Tagged nimble blog
Nimble Storage Hits Milestone with 1,000th Customer Win
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on January 30, 2013
Rapid Adoption of Company’s Flash-Optimized Storage Arrays Proves Market Demand for its Hybrid Approach
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….
Nimble Blog: O Snapshot: What Art Thou?
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on January 21, 2013
This is from Sachin Chheda, Nimble Storage Product Marketing
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)….
Nimble Blog: Storage Performance 101 Part 1 – Back to Basics
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on January 21, 2013
This is from Wen, @Wensteryu, Nimble Storage Technology Evangelist.
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….
Nimble Blog: VSS 101 and Design Considerations in VMware environment (Part II)
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on January 21, 2013
This is from Wen, @Wensteryu, Nimble Storage Technology Evangelist.
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….
Nimble Blog: VSS 101 and Design Considerations in VMware environment (Part I)
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on January 21, 2013
This is from Wen, @Wensteryu, Nimble Storage Technology Evangelist.
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….
Nimble Blog: Announcing the Nimble Storage SmartStack
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on October 19, 2012
This is from Suresh, Nimble Storage CEO
Today, we are proud and excited to announce the Nimble SmartStack. The first SmartStack offering is targeted at VDI workloads, working closely with VMware and Cisco to produce an integrated solution that has been tested for interoperability, performance and fast deployment, and has been endorsed by all three companies. Several months ago, we announced the certification of our storage platform as part of the VMware rapid desktop program. Today, we are proud to be among a small number of storage platforms that are UCS certified. There are three major benefits from the SmartStack solution:
- Economically-Viable, Converged Infrastructure Solution for Mid-Sized Enterprises. Nimble was able to bring dramatic economic benefits through substantially higher performance, lower cost of capacity, dramatically better business continuity and operational simplicity to a mid-sized Enterprise – customers that were otherwise unable to deploy VDI projects because the cost of a pre-integrated converged infrastructure stack was prohibitively expensive.
- Best-of-Breed Flash-Optimized Storage, Available as Converged Infrastructure. The Nimble architecture is unparalleled in its ability to leverage flash for high performance along with low-cost HDDs for low cost of capacity. What further distinguishes our approach and makes us particularly well suited for workloads such as VDI is that our scale-to-fit architecture (see white paper ») allows us to be extremely flexible – we can increase the ratio of flash within our system when workloads such as VDI need higher performance or lower the ratio of flash when workload such as file services need greater capacity – thus spanning an extremely broad range of workloads.
- Channel Leverage. Over the last two years, we have built a rapidly growing base of over 300 channel partners, most of whom were already Cisco partners and VMware partners. Our SmartStack approach allows us to leverage that synergy and rapidly bring the solution to market.
More here….
http://goo.gl/PCLyW
Nimble Blog: “Gotcha” with VMware Site Recovery Manager
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on October 11, 2012
This is from Wen, @Wensteryu, Nimble Storage Technology Evangelist
I have recently been playing a lot more with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) product – as the Nimble SRA EA is out to customers, we have gotten quite a few inquiries on WTF moments (in other words, “gotchas”)…so here they are, in order of installation, configuration, test failover & failover.
More here….
http://goo.gl/HIrIU
Nimble Blog: Storage for Your Branch Office VDI
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on October 10, 2012
This is from Radhika, Nimble Storage Head of Solutions and Alliances
“One size fits all” is not a tenet applicable for branch office deployments. Branch office deployments vary based on number of users, type of applications, available WAN bandwidth, and IT infrastructure.
A recent ESG survey shows that 92 percent of customers are interested in replacing the laptops/PCs of their remote office employees with virtual desktops running in a central location. VMware, working with partners such as Nimble Storage, provides a variety of approaches to tackle VDI with their Branch Office Desktop solution. One way to deploy is the centrally-hosted desktop environment and the other is using a locally-hosted desktop solution kept in sync using VMware Mirage. Either way, you want to make sure the storage you choose is optimized for your specific deployment model….
More here….
http://goo.gl/pyKTy
Nimble Blog: Are All Hybrid Storage Arrays Created Equal?
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on October 9, 2012
This is from Ajay, Nimble Storage VP Product Management
Nimble Storage was founded in early 2008 on the premise that hybrid storage arrays would be the dominant networked storage architecture over the next decade – a premise that is now widely accepted. The interesting question today is, “Are all hybrid storage arrays are created equal?” After all, SSDs and HDDs are commodities, so the only factor setting them apart is the effectiveness of the array software.
How does one compare hybrid storage arrays? Here are some key factors:
- How cost-effectively does the hybrid storage array use SSDs to minimize costs while maximizing performance?
- How cost-effectively does the hybrid storage array use HDDs to minimize costs while maximizing useable capacity?
- How responsive and flexible is the hybrid array at handling multiple workloads and workload changes?
- Aside from price/performance and price/capacity, how efficient is the array data management functionality (such as snapshots, clones, and replication)?
More here….
http://goo.gl/yhAvX
Nimble Blog: All Storage Arrays Will Be Hybrid Storage Arrays
Posted by Marc Malotke in Uncategorized on October 3, 2012
This is from Suresh, Nimble Storage CEO
The Register recently wrote about us (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/11/nimble_forty_million/), and made the point that all storage arrays would become hybrid storage arrays. I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly. Nimble Storage was founded on this premise because we believe that hybrid storage arrays simultaneously optimize performance and useable capacity. Further, intelligent hybrid storage arrays have a cost structure that when combined with efficient, pointer-based snapshots, allows for thousands of snapshots to be collocated with primary application data for near-instantaneous data recovery….
More here….
http://goo.gl/DXA9U
