Nimble Storage Steps Up in Enterprise Class

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One of the primary reasons that managing storage is difficult is that application workloads have different levels of performance requirements that require specific levels of I/O throughput to maintain. To make it simpler to manage that process, Nimble Storage today announced that it has extended the capabilities of its hybrid storage arrays to give storage administrators more granular control over I/O service levels.

Enhancements to the Adaptive Flash platform from Nimble Storage include the ability to always deliver an all-flash service level, an auto-flash service level that can be invoked when necessary, and a disk-only service level for applications where storage capacity is more important than I/O throughput.

Nimble Storage is also adding support for software-based encryption and a REST application programming interface (API) that makes the overall storage environment more accessible to third-party management tools.

Radhika Krishnan, head of product and alliances for Nimble Storage, says these latest additions are part of a continuing Nimble Storage effort to better serve enterprise-class IT organizations. Nimble Storage initially gained traction in the midmarket thanks mainly to a management platform running in the cloud that made it simpler to manage a hybrid storage array. Over the last year, however, Nimble Storage has rolled out a series of offerings that directly rival enterprise-class storage system from EMC, NetApp and others.

With over 5,000 customers using its systems, Nimble Storage has clearly become well-established enough to now compete at almost every application level. At a time when the emergence of Flash storage is prompting most of those customers to rethink how they manage storage, the rise of Nimble Storage as a legitimate alternative for enterprise-class applications should present some interesting challenges for the major storage vendors that have traditionally dominated the category in the months and years ahead.