Flash storage company Nimble Storage has announced new enterprise-grade capabilities to the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform. Advancements to the Adaptive Flash platform include the ability to deliver an all-flash service level for applications with stringent requirements around responsiveness, an auto-flash service level for mainstream applications, and a disk-only service level for applications requiring low-cost capacity, all within a single storage architecture and platform. Additional capabilities include software-based encryption and a REST API-based extensibility framework.
All-Flash Service Level
The all-flash service level is designed to meet the most stringent latency demands – its responsiveness is ideal for transaction processing, data warehouse/business intelligence, and VDI deployments. Service levels can be changed on the fly from operation in one service level to a different service level as workload demands fluctuate over time.
Encrypt Data at the Volume or Array Level
Now with software-based encryption, Nimble SmartSecure provides storage administrators with the ability to efficiently enable data encryption in consolidation and multi-tenant storage environments. This new software feature enables both encryption and shredding on a per-application or per-array level. SmartSecure does not require custom drivers or dedicated firmware to implement. Once data is compressed and encrypted by the company’s CASL flash-optimized file system, it can be securely replicated to another site with the target site understanding the encryption key.
Expanded Management
With the addition of REST APIs, the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform now enables storage administrators to build customized reporting and workflows around storage.
Identify and Address Virtual Machine Performance
Nimble InfoSight, the company’s cloud-connected management and support engine, provides granular visibility into VM, network, and LUN latencies enabling administrators to quickly and confidently identify and resolve resource contention issues and maintain service level agreements. The new per-VM monitoring feature, InfoSight-VMVision, intuitively flags conditions that may cause performance issues showing throughput, IOPs, and latency levels across all layers: host, network, and storage. Armed with actionable intelligence administrators can proactively identify and address rogue or “noisy neighbor” VMs that consume more than their fair share of infrastructure resources.
Integrated Data Protection
Nimble offers a fully integrated data protection package for primary storage, backup, and disaster recovery. Nimble’s data protection enables administrators to take instant snapshots – point-in-time copies that capture just-changed data. Enabling the capacity-saving redirect-on-write feature means that snapshot data will not be copied automatically onto future snapshots and that administrators can restore snapshots whenever they are required. Nimble allows IT administrators to house all snapshots and production data on the same array thereby eliminating overhead inefficiencies and assuring instantaneous data recovery. Fully integrated data protection reduces complexity, overhead, and risk, enabling administrators to maintain business continuity and gain responsiveness.
“The new innovations we’re delivering within the Adaptive Flash platform provide enterprise IT organizations with the ability to consolidate and support all workloads across their environment on a single storage architecture and platform. Enterprises will no longer be forced to make trade-offs in building and managing independent storage silos to support tiered applications and workloads,” says Dan Leary, vice president of worldwide marketing, Nimble Storage. “By delivering a storage consolidation platform, much like virtualization has done for compute, we are empowering enterprise IT organizations to dynamically meet service level agreements for enterprise-wide applications at a lower total cost of ownership.”
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