Nimble Storage delivers choice and control

Nimble’s Storage-on-Demand, a pay-as-you-go offering, is a true utility-based model that eliminates archaic long-term commitments by delivering service levels based on actual requirements and usage versus pre-defined hardware configurations. In addition, organisations building private or public clouds leveraging OpenStack can now fully realise the value of Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform to predict, manage and deliver the storage required to optimise business applications and workloads across their IT environments. With these innovative new pricing and deployment models, Nimble is providing enterprises and service providers with the highest level of choice and control over their storage infrastructure within cloud environments.

The economics associated with acquiring storage in cloud environments have historically been rigid and costly for customers yet highly lucrative for storage vendors. Customers typically pay up-front with capital expenditures or long-term leases and wind up paying a premium for unused storage while incurring incremental expenditures to increase storage capacity and performance as requirements change over time. Unlike competitive “on-demand” storage offerings designed to lock-in customers with multi-year subscription contracts that include fixed costs and configurations, Nimble’s Storage-on-Demand utility pricing model is based on the customer’s actual usage. By leveraging InfoSight, Nimble’s powerful and intuitive cloud-based management and support engine, cloud operators can manage and monitor storage and service levels from a single Web browser thereby eliminating the guesswork associated with storage management.

Nimble Storage-on-Demand customers select from one of four service level performance tiers, from high-performance Platinum to capacity-optimised Bronze, and are billed monthly on an economical cents per gigabyte basis for actual usage. Deep data analytics from InfoSight are used by Nimble to ensure that customers always have enough performance and buffer to maintain service levels. Nimble automatically ships additional performance or capacity to a customer, before it is needed, and at no additional cost to the customer. Monthly billing amounts increase or decrease based on actual usage.

"Xtium leverages Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform to deliver cost-effective managed cloud hosting and disaster recovery solutions with high levels of redundancy and reliability,” said Tim Vogel, CTO, Xtium. “The Nimble Storage-on-Demand purchasing model allows us to pay a monthly subscription, eliminating the onerous lock-ins of a regular purchase or lease. With more than 1 Petabyte of Xtium’s data footprint flowing through Nimble Storage, the on-demand model gives us the financial flexibility to continue developing solutions with increased service levels for our end-users."

Adaptive Flash Platform Integrates with Leading OpenStack Cloud platform
Nimble Storage now fully integrates with OpenStack, providing support for OpenStack Cinder storage, Nova compute, and Glance image repository services for private and public cloud environments. This frees organisations to build OpenStack-based clouds that support a broad range of application workloads and performance profiles on a single storage array. By integrating Nimble’s built-in snapshots and zero-copy cloning with OpenStack, organisations are able to rapidly stand up test and development environments without performance or capacity overhead. Nimble’s integration with OpenStack will help customers reduce cloud implementation times, free up dev-ops resources, deliver flexible and secure storage environments and, most importantly, ensure reliability.

“The Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform provides us with all the flexibility and performance we require in a very small data center footprint,” said Takuya Ito, senior manager, Yahoo! JAPAN. By utilising Nimble's OpenStack Cinder driver we have been able to leverage Nimble’s advanced functionality including the creation and provisioning of space efficient snapshots and volume clones.”

"Block storage is a key element of cloud infrastructure for many of our customers, and Nimble gave us a solution that delivers on our customers’ expectations,” said Hernan Alvarez, chief product officer, Blue Box. “We are now able to offer high-performance storage services built on Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform, with a rich feature set that includes efficient snapshots and zero-copy clones.”

“Storage-on-Demand provides enterprises and service providers with a flexible, efficient and high-performance solution that enables them to build and leverage the benefits and cost-savings of the cloud,” said Gavin Cohen, senior director of strategy and market development, Nimble Storage. “Long-term contracts leave customers with obsolete technology and empty wallets. We want customers to have the peace-of-mind in knowing that they are only paying for what they use and can grow and shrink capacity at any time as their business requirements change.”