Nimble Storage

Last updated
HPE Nimble Storage
Company type Subsidiary
Industry Information technology, data storage, solid state drives
Founded2008
Headquarters
San Jose, California
,
United States
Key people
Varun Mehta, co-founder
Umesh Maheshwari, co-founder and CTO
Suresh Vasudevan, CEO
ProductsAF-Series Predictive All Flash arrays: AF1000, AF3000, AF5000, AF7000, AF9000 CS-Series Adaptive Flash arrays: CS1000/H, CS3000, CS5000, CS7000
Number of employees
1000+
Parent Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Website www.hpe.com/storage/nimble

Nimble Storage, founded in 2008, is a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It specializes in producing hardware and software products for data storage, particularly data storage arrays that utilize the iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocols, and includes data backup and data protection features.

Contents

Dawn at Nimble Storage's campus in San Jose, California Dawn at Nimble Storage's new campus in San Jose, California..jpg
Dawn at Nimble Storage's campus in San Jose, California

History

Nimble Storage was established in January 2008 by Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari. [1] In July 2010, the company announced its first product, the CS200 series hybrid arrays, at Tech Field Day.

In September 2012, Nimble Storage secured $40.7 million in funding from both original and new investors, including Artis Capital Management and GGV Capital. [2]

Varun Mehta served as the chief executive until March 2011, when he became the vice president of engineering. Suresh Vasudevan assumed the role of CEO, and Umesh Maheshwari became the chief technology officer.

In October 2013, the company filed for its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange and subsequently went public on December 13, 2013, under the ticker symbol NMBL. [3]

Throughout its history, Nimble Storage introduced various product updates and expansions. In June 2014, the company announced the CS700 Series Arrays and an All-Flash Shelf, along with its Adaptive Flash technology. In November 2014, Nimble Storage released arrays supporting the Fibre Channel protocol.

In July 2015, the company announced updates to the Adaptive Flash platform, including Nimble SmartSecure (software-based encryption), all-flash service levels, REST APIs, InfoSight-VMVision per-VM monitoring and integrated data protection. Nimble Storage also achieved Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 Certification for the Adaptive Flash platform in August 2015.

The company experienced significant growth and recognition, ranking sixth on Deloitte's list of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and energy tech companies in North America in November 2015.

On February 23, 2016, Nimble Storage unveiled the Predictive All Flash Array series, combining fast flash performance with InfoSight Predictive Analytics. This was followed by the introduction of the AF-1000 Series All Flash array and updated CS-Series Adaptive Flash array portfolio on August 10, 2016.

On October 17, 2016, Nimble Storage formed a strategic partnership with Lenovo, resulting in the ThinkAgile CX Series solution.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the acquisition of Nimble Storage for approximately $1.09 billion in cash on March 7, 2017. The acquisition was finalized on April 5, 2017.

Products

All Flash Arrays

Nimble Storage's AF-Series arrays utilize flash performance as well as InfoSight Predictive Analytics. The AF-Series has product lines for data centers with different configurations based on the desired workload. The product lines are AF1000, AF3000, AF5000, AF7000, and AF9000.

Adaptive Flash Arrays

The Nimble CS-Series iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage array has 4 product lines for data centers available in each CS-Series. The product lines are CS200, CS300, CS500, and CS700 and combine both HDDs with SSDs in a hybrid fashion. In August 2016, Nimble Storage updated their CS-Series arrays to the following: CS1000/H, CS3000, CS5000, and CS7000. Nimble Storage also provides an All-Flash Shelf to add to CS-Series arrays.

Nimble's Adaptive Flash architecture combines both SSDs and HDDs, allowing users to benefit from the speed of flash storage while optimizing costs with disk storage. This hybrid approach enhances performance for various workloads.

Secondary Flash Arrays

The Secondary Flash Array was the first new Nimble product to be launched post merger with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It is a hybrid system based around the standard Nimble architecture but with enhanced de-duplication. The product is intended as a target for backups. [4]

SmartStack reference architectures

Nimble Storage provides SmartStack integrated infrastructure technology for Cisco Systems. Jointly developed by Cisco and Nimble Storage, SmartStack integrates compute, network, and storage resources. SmartStack provides Cisco Validated Designs and reference architectures that address the following workloads: desktop virtualization (or VDI), server virtualization and cloud computing, business-critical applications, Oracle database and applications, and SAP HANA. [5]

Technology

NimbleOS

NimbleOS is Nimble's operating system. It utilizes a patented file-system architecture and cache accelerated sequential layout (CASL). NimbleOS includes flexible flash scaling, adaptive flash service levels, dynamic flash-based read caching, write-optimized data layout, inline compression, scale-to-fit flexibility, scale out, snapshots and integrated data protection, efficient replication, deduplication, and zero-copy clones.

InfoSight Predictive Analytics

InfoSight is Nimble Storage's storage management and predictive analytics portal. It is designed to help with storage resource management as well as customer support. InfoSight has three primary components. The first, the InfoSight Engine, is a sophisticated data collection and analysis engine, equipped with data analytics, system modeling capabilities, and predictive algorithms. This engine is the core of InfoSight's functionality, allowing for detailed analysis and forecasting. The second component is the InfoSight Portal, a secure online platform that provides users with access to the insights generated by the InfoSight Engine. This portal acts as a user-friendly interface for interacting with the system's complex analytics. Lastly, the system includes Proactive Wellness, a feature that delivers proactive alerts regarding system health, performance, and potential protection gaps, ensuring users are informed and can respond swiftly to any issues.

Unified Flash Fabric

Nimble Storage's Unified Flash Fabric unifies Nimble's All Flash and Adaptive Flash arrays into a consolidated architecture with common data services. [6] This architecture is built upon existing CASL [7] [8] architecture and InfoSight.

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References

  1. ↑ Rogers, Bruce. "Nimble Storage Aims to Disrupt the Enterprise Storage Business". Forbes.
  2. ↑ Hesseldahl, Arik. "Riverbed CEO Kennelly Joins Board of Startup Nimble Storage". AllThingsD.
  3. ↑ Group, Jeremy C. Owens (2013-12-13), Nimble Storage gains more than 60 percent after IPO, Bay Area News, retrieved 2024-01-12
  4. ↑ Mellor, Chris (May 2017). "HPE's Nimble Secondary Flash Array uses... disk?". The Register.
  5. ↑ "Cisco SmartStack Solution". Cisco. December 2015. Retrieved August 17, 2016.
  6. ↑ Kovar, Joseph F. (23 February 2016). "Nimble Storage Takes On EMC, Pure Storage With First All-Flash Storage Array". CRN. Retrieved 2016-03-10.
  7. ↑ Shanks, Eric (25 November 2013). "CASL with Nimble Storage". TheITHollow. Retrieved 2013-11-25.
  8. ↑ Kolomyeytsev, Anton. "Here's What LSFS (WAFL, CASL) Is About Where Log=Structuring Concept Came From, What It's Good For and Why". MSMVPBlogs. Archived from the original on 2015-12-20. Retrieved 2015-10-28.
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