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​Nimble Storage banks on data-backed predictive flash array

Flash storage provider Nimble Storage launched what it claims is the first predictive flash platform in the industry, banking on data collection to bolster itself above its competition.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor

San Jose-based flash storage firm Nimble Storage has taken a punt and launched a new series of predictive all flash arrays that utilises InfoSight, a predictive system analytics tool to keep a customer's application up at all times.

According to Mark Lazarus, Nimble Storage director of technology Asia Pacific and Japan, the response time of an application is more important to an organisation than how its infrastructure is managed or stored.

"All that's important is not the infrastructure, and not who's managing it or how it works, or whether it's in the cloud or not in the cloud," he said. "It's when I press a button on this screen, or this keyboard here, how long something's taking to happen on my screen -- that's what they're really interested in."

While Lazarus said going all-flash removes most of the storage constraints, he believes that in 50 percent of cases blamed on storage, it actually has little to do with storage, and that storage addresses merely half of the problem.

"[Flash] is very fast and able to deliver low level latency, high performance capabilities in the storage layer," Lazarus said. "Flash by and in itself is not enough to solve this issue."

Lazarus said that Nimble's new Predictive All Flash Arrays combines the fast performance of flash with InfoSight Predictive Analytics -- the first predictive flash platform in the industry, which uses data to predict and prepare for spikes in daily operation.

"Nimble Storage has leapfrogged the competition," he said.

According to Lazarus, it is important for an organisation to determine where barriers lie within the infrastructure.

"It's only when you do this sort of capability can you understand how to close that gap and understand what's going on," he said. "So in more than 50 percent of cases, you need to look outside of storage to understand what's going on within the environment to understand that problem."

The flagship Nimble AF9000 All Flash Array delivers performance of up to 350,000 IOPS at sub-millisecond latency and scales effective capacity to over 2PB in just 12U, which the company said is significantly higher in comparison to competitive all flash arrays.

In scale-out four-node cluster configurations, Nimble Storage said the AF9000 can non-disruptively and independently scale performance up to 1.2M IOPS and effective capacity to over 8PBs.

Nimble Storage CEO Suresh Vasudevan believes that an enterprise is totally dependent on data to improve its customer interaction, accelerate product development, and run the back office.

"Immediate data access is critical to maintaining competitive edge. It's clear that complex infrastructure creates an app-data gap that slows down data delivery which impacts critical business processes," he said.

"The Predictive Flash Platform combines flash performance with predictive analytics to close the app-data gap even when the barriers to data velocity are not storage related."

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Nimble Storage All Flash Array

​Image: Supplied
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