Nimble Storage All Flash Gear Hits Market

After years of selling hybrid storage arrays, Nimble Storage has entered the All-Flash sector going head to head with Tegile and others.

Nimble in the past has sucessfully sold hybrid arrays that mix solid-state drives (SSDs) with mostly hard disk drives. There are four Nimble all-flash models that vary in capacity and performance. The flagship AF9000 scales to 553 TB of raw storage in a 4U array, with two 4U expansion shelves. The midrange AF7000 scales to 323 TB of raw capacity, with two expansion shelves. The AF5000 and entry-level AF3000 hold one expansion shelf apiece. The AF5000 scales to 184 TB, and the AF3000 scales to 92 TB of raw capacity.

Nimble claimed a mixed read-write performance ranging from 50,000 IOPS on the AF3000 to 300,000 IOPS on the AF9000, and up to 1.2 million IOPS per four-node AF9000 cluster.

Nimble customers can scale up to four AF arrays and manage them as a unified cluster. Nimble presumes 5:1 data reduction with its proprietary data compression and deduplication that boosts effective capacity to 2 PB per 12U configuration, and up to 8.2 PB per four-node AF9000 cluster.

The all-flash systems support Fibre Channel and iSCSI block storage. Nimble dubbed this all-flash system the Predictive Flash Platform, which uses the same cloud-based InfoSight Predictive Analytics as the Nimble Adaptive Flash hybrid arrays.

Nimble all-flash arrays use Samsung Electronics’ PM863 Series SSDs, ranging from 240 GB to 3.84 TB capacities. PM863 uses Samsung Vertical NAND flash technology. Nimble operating system (OS) software provides triple-parity RAID to withstand three simultaneous drive failures per AF array without data loss.

Nimble Storage all flash costs and pricing are just starting to become available.

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