Get Excited - NimbleOS 5.1 Is Now Available! Feature Summary & Technical Blog Series

[Nick_Dyer]

2019 so far has proven to be a stellar year for HPE Storage, with quarter on quarter AND year on year growth across the portfolio, but most importantly delighted and happy customers are fuelling that growth. We’re not slowing down and resting on our laurels – we’re actively ramping our engineering and development organisation to further provide value for our customers and partners using HPE Storage (stay tuned on that!).

We’re excited to announce that after many years of hard work from Nimble Engineering, NimbleOS 5.1 (codenamed Goa) has officially reached Initial Production Release status - also known as IPR - and is now publicly available for production use!

Here are the full set of ‘big ticket’ features that are inside of the NimbleOS 5.1 release:NimbleOS 5.1 Big Ticket Features

As with previous NimbleOS releases, field Nimble SMEs are writing a series of technical blogs detaiing these new features in a bit more detail. Please check back to see the latest feature blogs posted.

Technical Feature Blogs
Introduction to Peer Persistence - Part 1
MultiProtocol Access - iSCSI & Fibre Channel
VMware HTML5 Plugin for VMFS & VVols
VMware VVols Meets Nimble's HTML5 VMware Plugin
Enhancements with Folders

Alongside the headline grabbing features there’s also a lot of backend enhancements, tweaks and usability changes we’ve made in order to keep making the system as Easy to Consume as possible.

NimbleOS 5.1 is a particularly interesting release, as it brings to market one of the most hotly requested features from our customers and partners; Synchronous Replication, fully complete with Application Transparent Failover.

This has been branded Peer Persistence for consistency in marketing within the HPE portfolio, but it’s truly a ‘designed-from-scratch’ feature, the Nimble way. In fact, this could be the most easy-to-setup sync replication solution in the storage industry today, as anyone can do it with a couple of clicks of a mouse and no prior training.

We’re truly excited by Peer Persistence, as it’s a feature that will allow for seamless failover of applications and environments between sites without any manual re-configuration. This has been demanded by our customers particularly in Europe seemingly forever, so it’s fantastic to see this feature delivered – all without any additional costs to our customers.

With this new release, there are new host software available to use for Windows, VMware, Linux, Containers & others. These are available on Infosight to download, as always.

A brief history of NimbleOS innovations

What’s even more staggering is the quality and consistency of Nimble engineering. Throughout the years, engineering has delivered many ‘enterprise demanding’ features for the Nimble platforms, without charging an extra penny for anyone to use the feature.

This is a key component of our Timeless Storage strategy – where customers confidently invest in Nimble Storage with comfort of knowing that all features will always be included, as well as flat support pricing, and future proofed for new storage innovations such as NVMe and Storage Class Memory.Timeless storage. No caveats, happy customers!

Over the next few weeks, Nimble Support and our Infosight AI/ML engine will work together to automatically allow list installed systems based on known ‘good candidates’ to upgrade to this release. If you would like to have early access to the code, please do speak with Nimble Support who can assist with allowing your system to download the new code!

Documentation (requires Infosight login):
Release notes here
GUI Guide here
CLI Guide here
VMware Integration Guide here
REST API reference here

Please leave your feedback in the comments below, and we hope you enjoy using the new features! And don't forget to catch me on Twitter (@nick_dyer_), and my personal blog here.