Since its inception a decade ago, HPE Nimble Storage has set the bar for disrupting, simplifying, and modernizing storage to help customers accelerate their digital transformation. Today the innovation continues. Nimble Storage customers now have an enhanced platform that turbocharges apps, eliminates disruptions, and drives more IT agility.
The first Nimble Storage array shipped in 2010 with a clear mission – to radically simplify enterprise storage, and transform operations with artificial intelligence. For the last 10 years, Nimble Storage has delivered on this vision, shaping the storage industry with game-changing innovations across intelligence, predictive support, and hybrid cloud.
We’ve given our customers a uniquely intelligent, self-managing storage platform that unlocks IT agility and ensures apps are always-on and always-fast. It’s a storage experience that customers really love, because it frees them to focus on business acceleration, and eliminates the need to spend nights and weekends managing storage and fighting fires.
Building on 10 years of innovation
As I look back with pride on HPE Nimble Storage’s 10-year track record of disrupting the storage world, I am even more energized about the road ahead. Today, HPE Nimble Storage is taking the next step on this journey with the introduction of some exciting new performance, intelligence, and disaster recovery (DR) advancements.
With these new capabilities, HPE Nimble Storage customers can dramatically accelerate app speeds with Storage Class Memory, get more visibility and insights across the IT stack with HPE InfoSight support for Hyper-V, and enable simple, affordable, and comprehensive hybrid cloud DR with built-in 3-site global replication.
Storage Class Memory goes mainstream
Every digital enterprise desires the fastest data response times for critical applications in order to unlock the full potential value of data. Storage Class Memory (SCM) advances that goal with the disruptive speed of memory: SCM enables dramatic performance boosts and predictable ultra-low latency at scale for demanding transactional database and analytics workloads. However, SCM today is cost-prohibitive as a persistent storage tier. The ability to leverage the benefits of SCM, therefore, requires a highly efficient hybrid architecture that optimizes cache.
Unlike other vendors, HPE Nimble Storage is uniquely architected with a cache accelerated file system that efficiently optimizes read performance in hybrid configurations. Intelligent, dynamic caching ensures very high cache-hits (typically more than 95% of random read IO) for a very small percentage of cache media. As a result, for the past decade we’ve been able to deliver incredible all-flash-like performance at nearly the price of spinning media in our HPE Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash array. And now we’ve refined our caching algorithms to optimize the next generation of high-performance media, driving performance efficiency to the point where we can deliver all-SCM-like performance near the price of all-flash storage.[1]
We’re excited to announce that SCM is available now for existing or new HPE Nimble Storage AF60 and AF80 All Flash Arrays. To demonstrate the potential performance improvements, we tested an Oracle database running on an HPE Nimble Storage AF80 with SCM. The results showed 2X faster response times, with an average sub-250μs latency, making it ideal for primarily read-centric workloads such as OLTP, data analysis, or reporting.
For existing customers, SCM is a simple, plug-and-play upgrade. SCM adapter kits can be easily and non-disruptively self-installed – without the need for tuning, forklift upgrades, storage media replacement, or data migrations. And to answer the question “Will this benefit me?” we have application performance and insights from HPE InfoSight that can tell our customers if their applications will see a performance improvement before they invest in SCM.
Hybrid Cloud disaster recovery expanded
When it comes to DR, enterprises need to meet their SLAs, but they also want the flexibility to match different RPO/RTOs per workload. Customers also demand a simpler experience – from managing replication through to the actual infrastructure.
HPE Nimble Storage has 6x9s of proven availability based on real, achieved values (as opposed to theoretical projections) measured across the entire installed base. And as enterprises entrust their data with us, we guarantee 6x9s availability for every HPE Nimble Storage customer. For business continuity in the event of site-wide outages or natural disaster, HPE Nimble Storage supports Peer Persistence (synchronous replication with automatic failover) across 2 sites. We also support asynchronous replication on-premises, or in the cloud for extended distances.
With today’s announcement, HPE Nimble Storage is expanding its disaster recovery options with the ability to support 3-site asynchronous replication – including to the public cloud with HPE Cloud Volumes – and the flexibility to enable data to be used for test/dev and analytics in the cloud. These new replication capabilities are built into HPE Nimble Storage, and can be configured in minutes with no specialized storage skills, no additional software fees, and no need for professional services.
HPE Nimble Storage customers now have expanded business continuity and disaster recovery options to meet any SLA.
HPE InfoSight expands visibility across the stack with support for Hyper-V
The complexity of virtualized infrastructure makes improving application performance and resource management challenging and time-consuming. That’s why one of the most valued and differentiated features of HPE InfoSight is cross-stack analytics in VMware environments. IT managers have been able to improve application performance and optimize resources via intelligence that goes beyond storage, delivering deeper visibility, insight, and diagnostics into potential issues across a customer’s virtual infrastructure.
Today, HPE InfoSight for HPE Nimble Storage is adding support for Hyper-V. Microsoft customers will now have instant and complete visibility across their environments. They’ll be able to easily pinpoint and root cause performance issues between storage and VMs, and to identify underutilized virtual resources. An industry-first capability for a storage array, this kind of visibility for Hyper-V environments radically simplifies virtual machine management.
Since its inception a decade ago, HPE Nimble Storage has set the bar for disrupting, simplifying, and modernizing storage to help customers accelerate their transformation. Ten years on and the innovation continues apace. With today’s announcement, Nimble Storage customers will have an enhanced platform that turbocharges apps, eliminates disruptions, and drives more IT agility.
Check out these resources for more details:
- Watch the HPE Primary Storage news Chalk Talk – June 2020 (video)
- Watch the Storage Class Memory with HPE Nimble Storage Chalk Talk (video)
- Watch the HPE Nimble Storage SCM Lightboard Video
- Watch the HPE InfoSight for Hyper-V Video
Here's the SCM with HPE Nimble Storage Chalk Talk.
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[1] Based on a 10% ASP difference of HPE Nimble Storage AF80 equipped with the 1.5TB Storage Class Memory FIO Adapter Kit.
Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Simon Watkins, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager, HPE Storage.
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