Nimble Storage Advances Adaptive Flash Platform: Releases Fibre Channel Storage Arrays

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 18, 2014) - Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL), the flash storage solutions company, today announced the availability of Fibre Channel protocol support for the CS-series arrays. The Nimble Adaptive Flash platform, the preferred choice for over 4,000 customers worldwide, empowers IT organizations to predict, manage and deliver the storage required to optimize business applications and workloads across the enterprise. Today's announcement marks a significant milestone, enabling Nimble to effectively address enterprise-wide storage requirements and quadruple the addressable market the company is now able to serve.

With today's announcement, Nimble also introduced significant expansion of the scalability limits for its CS-series array clusters. Leveraging a combination of increased shelf count, denser Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and denser Solid State Drives (SSDs), Nimble now enables enterprises to scale non-disruptively to over 1.6PBs of raw capacity and over 160TBs of flash per cluster to handle very large datasets while maintaining the highest levels of responsiveness.

Enterprises are under pressure to keep pace with increasing user expectations and place a premium on maintaining service level agreements (SLA) and achieving peak workload performance. To maintain compliance with SLAs, enterprise IT organizations have provisioned storage in alignment with the unique performance and capacity requirements of individual workloads, exacerbating storage silo sprawl, increasing cost and complexity and exposing the business to risk. The Nimble Adaptive Flash platform addresses this challenge by effectively consolidating enterprise workloads onto a single storage array. Nimble's unique scale-to-fit architecture is purpose-built to scale storage performance and capacity in line with workload requirements and InfoSight, the company's powerful and intuitive cloud-based management and analytics engine, provides the proactive insight required to scale application environments in an informed, intelligent manner.

Customers Successfully Deploy Nimble Fibre Channel-based Arrays
The recently introduced Nimble CS300, CS500 and CS700 series arrays now offer both iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocol support. To effectively test and validate the expanded protocol support in real world environments, Nimble initiated and completed a formal beta program with more than 40 enterprises which resulted in customers purchasing and deploying Fibre Channel-based arrays in production environments. Customers reported high levels of satisfaction with the ease of deployment and ability to consolidate a broad range of enterprise applications and workloads, all within a single efficient and compact platform.

Power Integrations Consolidates Oracle and Virtual Servers onto Nimble Array
For Power Integrations, a leading supplier of high-voltage ICs designed for energy-efficient power supplies, Nimble's new Fibre Channel-enabled arrays offer a faster path to consolidating the company's mix of business-critical applications, including Oracle and virtual servers, off its legacy storage infrastructure. "Not only did Nimble deliver the additional performance demanded by our VM environment, we were able to set it up in a third of the time we spent setting up our current storage," said senior systems architect Jaime Huizar. "We are really impressed with how smoothly we were able to deploy the Fibre Channel-enabled Nimble array -- the discovery, the configuration of the array... I still don't understand how Nimble made it so easy!"

LANDesk Reduces Datacenter Footprint and Obtains All-flash Performance
With a forlklift upgrade of LANDesk's legacy storage infrastructure looming, senior system administrator Jeremy Balter sought out a new, rapidly deployable high-performance storage system that offered much greater longevity. "We replaced half a rack of our previous storage with only 9U of Nimble," said Balter. "Frankly, I've never seen any other vendor deliver the kind of performance that Nimble does with the same set of hardware. We were seeing all-flash performance without the corresponding expense. Furthermore, Nimble removes all of the complexity from the configuration process, and our Fibre Channel array was fully operational in very little time."

Terra Experiences 4x Performance Increase Over Previous Storage
For Terra, Australia's premium Wholesale Cloud/IaaS provider, providing high performance and reliable storage is critical. Having made a significant investment in 16GB Fibre Channel infrastructure, Rob Georgievski, Terra's co-founder and principal director, found Nimble's new Fibre Channel-enabled arrays to be a perfect fit. "In conjunction with our integration partner, Genisys, the implementation of Nimble into our Fibre Channel environment was extremely smooth, and the array has surpassed our expectations. This has been the most efficient experience we've had deploying a new storage array. Nimble has delivered over 4x performance improvement over our previous storage. We are proud to say that customers hosted in our cloud environment have enjoyed a measured 80% reduction in processing times on SQL workloads and an enhanced user experience within Citrix deployments as a result of the Nimble array."

A Siemens Company, eMeter, Depends on Nimble's Proven Ease of Use
Bryan Bond, senior systems administrator responsible for datacenter operations and virtualization Infrastructure at eMeter, a Siemens company that develops market-leading meter data management software, has long-standing experience deploying Nimble Storage. "We deployed one of the first Nimble Storage CS700 arrays back in June 2014. It was an incredibly easy configuration back then, and we were able to stand up the new Fibre Channel-enabled array with identical ease."

Fibre Channel Integration Enables Cosentry to Support Large SQL Databases
Kevin Kumpf, who leads the virtualization and storage team at Cosentry, a leading provider of Midwest data center solutions, was seeing a surge in demand for Fibre Channel storage systems in support of the frequent bursts of random IO inherent to large deployments of MS-SQL databases. "Given the great experience we've had with Nimble Storage, we jumped on the chance to deploy their new Fibre Channel-enabled arrays. We were really impressed to see such a deep level of Fibre Channel integration, coupled with the exact same intuitive and rapid configuration experience we've come to know with Nimble."

Nimble Provides Enterprises with Choice through its Partner Ecosystem
Nimble has worked closely with its partner ecosystem, including Brocade, Emulex and QLogic, to enable enterprises to leverage the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform across a range of network connectivity configurations. As Nimble expands its reach into the enterprise, fortifying relationships with industry leaders that are favored by enterprises will be critical to the company's long-term success.

"Gen 5 Fibre Channel is a foundational technology for flash-based storage solutions. Enterprises are faced with many challenges to consolidate and simplify their IT resources. The new Nimble Fibre Channel arrays, running on Brocade SAN fabrics, provides enterprise IT with confidence to consolidate their storage without compromising performance, availability and reliability," said Jack Rondoni, vice president, Storage Networking at Brocade.

"Enterprises rely on Emulex to support business-critical applications like Oracle and in-memory databases such as SAP Hana and NoSQL," said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. "The undeniable performance benefits of flash storage is helping drive increased mixed workloads, including virtualization, cloud computing and VDI. By expanding the reach of Nimble's Adaptive Flash platform to Fibre Channel environments, enterprises will be better equipped to consolidate these various workloads on a single platform."

"Fibre Channel continues to be the preferred technology for storage connectivity in the enterprise, based on its ubiquity, performance and reliability," said Vikram Karvat, vice president of products, marketing and planning, QLogic. "QLogic is the end-to-end brand of choice in Fibre Channel implementations, and we are pleased to be collaborating with Nimble Storage as they enable Fibre Channel connectivity on their CS-series arrays. Fully compatible with QLogic Host Bus Adapters, the CS-series arrays are well-equipped to deliver superior performance at an exceptional value."

Supporting Quotes
"Enterprise customers continue to adopt our flash solutions over incumbent vendors because our consolidation platform will adapt to meet the needs of growing workloads without disruption. By expanding the connectivity choice, we are now able to address enterprise-wide applications and workloads. Adding Fibre Channel protocol support dramatically expands our addressable market and ability to serve large enterprise and cloud service provider customers."
 - Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble Storage

"Nimble has been moving steadily upmarket, by extending its portfolio with new, larger and more powerful systems. Adding Fibre Channel support is an important part of this progression, and will open more doors for Nimble by increasing the flexibility and appeal of its products to large enterprises and service providers -- for whom Fibre Channel is the dominant and fastest growing form of storage networking."
 - Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451Research

"As a National solutions provider, CDW relies on partners, like Nimble Storage, to build products that meet our customers' needs. With Nimble's addition of Fibre Channel to its portfolio validates its efforts to provide robust data solutions to meet the evolving needs of customers. The company's flash storage solutions have already garnered a high confidence level due to their performance and efficiency benefits, this insertion of Fibre Channel furthers their ability to service a more diverse customer set."
- Matthew Soroka - Director Data Center Solutions, CDW

Nimble Storage Resources

• CEO Blog: Introducing our Fibre Channel SAN
  
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About Nimble Storage
Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) is redefining the storage market with its Adaptive Flash platform. Nimble's flash storage solutions enable the consolidation of all workloads and eliminate storage silos by providing enterprises with significant improvements in application performance and storage capacity. At the same time, Nimble delivers superior data protection, while simplifying business operations and lowering costs. At the core of the Adaptive Flash platform is the patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture and InfoSight, an automated cloud-based management and support system that maintains storage system peak health. More than 3,700 enterprises, governments, and service providers have deployed Nimble's flash storage solutions across 37 countries. For more information about Nimble Storage, visit www.nimblestorage.com and follow us on Twitter: @nimblestorage.

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