#VARUN MEHTA NIMBLE STORAGE SOFTWARE#

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. 'Unlike other large vendors who charge more for advanced features, our customers pay one low price to get cloning, thin provisioning and WAN replication,' said Dan Leary, Nimble's vice president of marketing. The boxes and also be cobbled together using a peer-to-peer clustering architecture to increase capacity. The CS-series arrays use an algorithm that Nimble calls a 'Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout' (CASL), which enables inline data compression, data deduplication and intelligent data optimization, which determines how the data is stored and when it's replicated across a WAN.Īccording to Mehta, CASL allows organizations to reduce their capital expenditures for storage and backup by at least 60%, while eliminating the need for separate, disk-based backup because it's all done in a single box. He also said he's a strong believer Data Domain's deduplication (now EMC's) product, and when he heard Nimble's founders had worked on the technology, it gave 'credence to the potential of a product there.' 'When you compare it to serious gear from EMC, I guess it could compete.' 'I'd guess it's about half or less the cost cost of a Fibre Channel SAN,' he said. For what we're doing, it was pretty impressive.'Ĭonde has yet to test the array with 'a significant number of databases' that would reveal the sustained throughput rate, but he said he has been impressed so far. We saw a very quick 8,000 or 12,000 IOPS. 'We were shocked with the performance of the product. I've been someone who for almost 5 years has not a big fan of tape. 'The very idea of collapsing some of the different storage technologies into a single device has a great appeal to me. For storage, eMeter uses a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) from IBM, which is a rebranded N-series storage array from NetApp.Ĭonde said his Fibtre Channel SAN would benefit from a complimentary, more cost effective tier of storage. The company has 100 physical servers and 250 virtual machines running VMware on x86 blade servers, as well as IBM AIX, Solaris and HP -UX operating systems. in San Mateo, Calif., has been running a CS220 with 5TB capacity in a test environment for a litter more than two months, and if things continue to go as well as they have, he plans on purchasing two of the boxes - one for primary storage and one for offsite disaster recovery.

#VARUN MEHTA NIMBLE STORAGE SOFTWARE#

'What we're doing is a logical extension of what we did at NetApp and Data Domain.'ĭave Conde and IT director at utility industry software developer eMeter Corp. Then we were both privileged to have same experience working at Data Domain,' Mehta said. I started my career at Sun over 20 years ago, where I worked on NFS. 'Both of us have a deep and extensive background in storage. Mehta said Nimble has secured more than $17 million in venture capital funding to date, and that the technology is a logical follow-on to its two founders work with other established storage vendors.

The arrays use 7,200 RPM hard disk drives from Western Digital and X25-M SSDs from Intel Corp. The arrays can set up with policies to store backup data for 60 or 90 days. The array come in two models, CS220, which can store up to 9TB of primary data and 108TB of backup data, and the CS240, which stores up to 18TB of primary data and 216TB of backup data. 'This is the first solution that places flash within reach for midsize enterprises - companies with between 200 and 2,000 employees,' Mehta said. The 3U high (5.25-in) arrays come with two quad-Gigabit Ethernet ports and run on multicore processors. The arrays use iSCSI as a transport protocol, allowing them to be connected via typical routers to application servers instead of more expensive and complicated Fibre Channel architectures. Mehta claims the array costs users under $3 per GB of primary storage and 25 cents per GB for backup capacity. The CS-Series arrays comes preconfigured with SSD that is used as cache to increase performance for high-I/O applications, and SATA drives for both primary storage and backup.

Varun mehta nimble storage