This document provides information about Nimble Storage, including:
- Nimble Storage is a data storage company headquartered in San Jose with over 1,100 employees worldwide.
- They have over 15,000 customers since 2010 across industries like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and more.
- Nimble Storage offers both all-flash arrays and adaptive flash arrays to provide fast performance for latency-sensitive workloads as well as a balance of performance and capacity.
Perhaps the best validation of our value proposition is the pace at which customers have embraced us. We now have over 7,500 customers spanning a wide range of industries deploying us for a broad set of workloads. In the last 5.5 years, we have grown our customer base to be larger than all of the other emerging flash companies combined.
As individuals we interact with technology on a daily basis, and have come to expect that data will be available instantly. A great example is when we get into a car and open Google maps to navigate to our destination.
When the data is delayed we are frustrated and our time is wasted.
Businesses are not very different. Every business today relies on applications to support business critical processes, and these applications, in turn, rely on rapid and timely access to data from the underlying infrastructure.
When something in the infrastructure layer slows down the applications, it can negatively impact business outcomes. This is what we refer to as the App-Data gap.
So, the interesting question is what causes this App-Data Gap?
To determine the causes of the App-Data gap, we analyzed anonymized data collected from deployments at our more than 7,500 customers. This data looks at issues across the infrastructure stack. Surprisingly, we found that storage is a contributing factor in less than half the cases (48%). Other issues include general configuration, interoperability, compute or network performance issues, and host config issues. More broadly, infrastructure complexity is a key driver of the App-Data gap, and often, the biggest challenge is simply knowing what part of the infrastructure is causing the Application to misbehave.
Let’s go back to the technology catalysts that led to the founding of the company. To close the app-data gap you first need Flash storage to eliminate storage performance bottlenecks.
However, flash alone is not adequate. The second technology catalyst is big data analytics. By monitoring infrastructure on a real-time basis from the cloud, and using predictive analytics, we can predict and prevent infrastructure disruptions that impact applications.
Let’s go back to the technology catalysts that led to the founding of the company. To close the app-data gap you first need Flash storage to eliminate storage performance bottlenecks.
However, flash alone is not adequate. The second technology catalyst is big data analytics. By monitoring infrastructure on a real-time basis from the cloud, and using predictive analytics, we can predict and prevent infrastructure disruptions that impact applications.
The unified flash fabric
Combines industry leading hybrid flash arrays with all flash arrays which democratizes flash, making it available to all apps
You can address the entire spectrum of apps in the enterprise
You can migrate seamlessly across hybrid and all flash arrays
Tailor the environment, from all flash all the way to a small amount of flash.
Nimble scale-to-fit is part of the flexibility story that allows you to start anywhere on this graph and go anywhere else you want entire non-disruptively without incurring any kind of application downtime and at the lowest incremental cost.
We all know that different applications have different requirements in terms of performance and capacity.
Nimble Scale-to-Fit allows you to cluster nodes and gain linear scaling of performance and capacity.
This enables you to scale at the lowest incremental cost.
Nimble scale-to-fit is part of the flexibility story that allows you to start anywhere on this graph and go anywhere else you want entire non-disruptively without incurring any kind of application downtime and at the lowest incremental cost.
We all know that different applications have different requirements in terms of performance and capacity.
Nimble Scale-to-Fit allows you to cluster nodes and gain linear scaling of performance and capacity.
This enables you to scale at the lowest incremental cost.
Firstly, as I have mentioned before, Nimble has achieved an actual measured 99.9997% availability across our entire customer base of more than 7,500 customers. That’s less than 8 seconds of unplanned downtime a month! This non-stop availability comes from the redundant and fault-tolerant “No Single Point of Failure” hardware, our robust software architecture and of course InfoSight. CLICK. We are the only vendor that has implemented Triple Plus Parity RAID. Other All Flash arrays either use single or double parity. This means that we can withstand the simultaneous loss of three entire SSDs without missing a beat (try this on competitors’ systems!). The “plus” refers to the use of additional “intra-drive” parity in every SSD. So even when we are missing three entire SSDs, every other SSD could still have additional errors and we will continue operating using the intra-drive parity to reconstruct the missing data. CLICK. Since shipping our first product we have included comprehensive Integrated Data Protection capabilities through SmartSnap application consistent backups and SmartReplicate. We also have integration with backup applications like CommVault (IntelliSnap), Symantec and others to come this year. CLICK. And our most secure customers use SmartSecure encryption. This provides encryption and data shredding down to application or data-set granularity. And it’s FIPS certified.
The ability to replicate from between arrays of any type has been built into our platform since day 1, and there are no software licenses required. We can take thousands of application-consistent point in time copies without performance impact. This is done through SmartSnap and you can instantly recover from these online copies too. We also have integration with third party vendors like CommVault (using IntelliSnap) and Symantec with more vendors to come. At the remote site you can keep a rich history of fine-grained backups stored iin a cost optimized configuraiton. You can also use the storage for things like Dev/Test, archival and all your secondary needs.
SmartSnap: Instant, Efficient, Granular & Application Aware
Over 150,000 application & backup integrated, Zero-Copy, snapshots improving application RPO & RTO
SmartReplicate: Granular & Efficient Replication
Only compressed, pattern free, changed blocks cross the network for simple, WAN-efficient, disaster recovery
SmartSecure: Replication Aware, Encryption
FIPS certified, per volume, per application, per tenant or per array encrypted data, even during replication
Restore: Near-Instantaneous, No Data movement, Less risk
Reduce recovery time & risk with Zero-Copy, thin, compressed, deduplicated and flash accelerated restores
Copies: Zero-Data move, Thin, Higher Utilization, Lower Costs
Instant, fully functional clones enable better and faster Dev-Test, faster time to market and business agility without the storage costs
Reduce: Intelligent Data Reduction, Smarter Consumption, Lower Costs
Per array or per volume or application, variable compression, deduplication and pattern elimination
Show SAP ERP and Oracle CRM on AFA; Show SAP test & dev and Exchange and VDI and Analytics on HFA;
Show Analytics moving from HFA to AFA
Show SAP ERP and Oracle CRM on AFA; Show SAP test & dev and Exchange and VDI and Analytics on HFA;
Show Analytics moving from HFA to AFA
The InfoSight Engine:
A data collection and analysis engine comprised of sophisticated analytics, system modeling capabilities, and predictive algorithms.
Performance correlation analytics
quickly identify leading factors contributing to performance or latency issues, eliminating what used to take up to several days of manual data collection and analysis.
Detailed systems modeling helps identify performance bottlenecks, and indicates whether increasing cache or upgrading controllers would improve performance of deployed workloads.
Powerful, predictive algorithms enable administrators to visualize organic data growth and identify when the array will approach capacity limits.
Proactive Wellness is powered by InfoSight.
Pattern matching and correlation are used to quickly and proactively detect sub-optimal array conditions ranging from potential disk failure, to multi-pathing issues, to a volume not being set up for replication.
Cases are created and closed automatically once resolved As a result, you can expect a proven uptime greater than 99.999%.
More than 90% of support cases detected without you knowing about them.
And more than 80% resolved automatically.
Timeless storage is best thought of as our commitment to protect the investment you have made in Nimble Storage, and it is comprised of three components.
The first component is our unwavering commitment to make our customers successful. This means that we are honest in our claims about what our product can do. This also means that we are committed to proactive support that is better than any in our industry and that we deliver “legendary” support.
The second component is our Timeless guarantee.
All of our software is included as part of the product, and we do not Nickel and Dime our customers on software licenses
We don’t increase our support pricing in years 4 and 5.
We also provide a support option that includes a free controller upgrade after three years. And our modular system design means that there are no forklift upgrades.
The third component is the option we provide our customers – you can either procure our systems as capital spend or using Opex by purchasing capacity on demand. Unlike leases, this is a true storage on demand solution that charges on the basis of actual usage – whether your usage goes up or down.