TFD Sea10 – Nimble Storage : A new company emerges at TechFieldDay
The TechFieldDay success must be huge, when a company decides to use TFD as a platform to announce it’s launch. The delegates are all witnessing this launch. It is a great experience to be able to be part of an event like TFD, especially when you also get to be part of a new companies launch.
The introduction
The new company is called NimbleStorage, was founded in 2008 and is based in San Jose. Nimble Storage offers a hybrid of flash and SATA storage array. The 3U high box services iSCSI storage and has a fixed size, no scale-up. Nimble Storage claims to achieve 60% cost reduction than existing solutions. Nimble’s storage architecture is “log-structured file system” which was created by Mendel Rosenblum (VMware founder).
- Varun Mentha (CEO & Co-Founder) kicks off by introducing his crew.
- Umesh Maheshwari (CTO & Co-Founder and filesystem expert)
- Dan Leary (VP Marketing)
- Ajay (Former Netapp)
Nimble Storage will be selling through VAR channels exclusively. At first they will be selling in the US only, but expansion to Europe will be in the works for 2011.
The technology
- (MLC) Flash and Low-cost High-capacity SATA disks iSCSI based storage targeted at the mid-sized enterprises.
- Point in time snapshot primary Replication based DR
- Capacity optimized snapshots in stead of traditional backup to eliminate backup windows.
- Listpricing < $3/GB
- Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL Highlists)
- LZ-ish based inline compression reduces data 2-4x (no dedupe)
- Flash caters to high-performance for all active data
- SATA disk cost-effectively stores all primary data and 90 days worth of snapshots
- WAN efficient offsite replication
- Application aware snapshots/backups (Microsoft VSS and VMware integration)
- Nimble Storage says they are 35x time more space efficient than leading vendors in this market (eg:Dell/Equalogic)
- Different retentions periods for local and remote data
- Bi-directional replication
- System many-to-one replication.
- Volume is one-to-one replication. This means many systems can replicate to one, but a single volume only has a single replication relationship.
- Rapid fail-over between sites (including flexible iqn identities)
- Version 1.0 is not cascaded replication, but it will be there in future releases
- Application templates
- Predifined application aware storage and data protection configuration
- LUN Blocksizes are matched to the application
- LUN Caching is matched to the application
- Zero-copy hypervisor integrated cloning (included in the package)
- Web based GUI, and SSH based full featured CLI interface
- Full autosupport feature built-in (Real-Time Phone Home Support)
- MPIO is used for fail-over, no network based LACP
The flash storage is used as an intelligent cache that holds all the active data. What is active data is determined by the use frequency (and more). The cache is indexed. All data is written to SATA disks, so the flash disks are really only used as cache. All incoming data is compressed inline. Due to compression, the actual blocksize of the written data can vary. Because all the data is written sequentially to the SATA disks, the various blocksizes pose no real issue, and they are all supported. This also enables an application specific blocksize. By using templates in the definition for volumes, you can match the blocksize to match the blocksize to for example an Microsoft Exchange database volume, and another volume for it’s logs where both have different blocksizes.
All volumes can have their own snapshot schedules, or they can be grouped together in Protection Sets, which can be considered consistency groups (volume groups, not hosts groups).
You might be affraid that the SATA disk would provide bad performance, but the sequential reads and writes are actually something SATA disks can do pretty well. So this performance risk is mitigated by the compression-sequential-write (full blocks) part of the array’s code.
The flash cache is made up out of SSD’s, and are hot-replaceable and are shared between the controllers. All data is already on disk and therefore there is no need for any means of protection for these cache disks.
Products
- 3RU Units, large flash layer, multicore Intel Xeon processors
- Comes with 2 x quad GbE NICs
- Everything is redundant (controllers are active/passive)
- All drives are hot swapable
- peer-to-peer clustering
- Annual maintenance between $4000 and $6000 .
Roadmap
Although NimbleStorage wasn’t going to give us any formal roadmap intel at the moment, the following features are surely being introduced in upcoming upgrades/updates.
- Cascaded replication
- VMware SRM integration
- 10GbE NICs
- V1.1 Scale out, LUN’s can be striped across arrays.
- Role based access.
- QoS for replication sessions (including time of day based policies)
- SNMP alerting
- FCoE
Overall impression
Curtis W. Preston asked (and I was pondering on it) “why not NAS?”. The midsize customer segment doesn’t use a lot of NFS and for CIFS, the tend to use a regular Windows file server with (iSCSI) block storage from the SAN. The context to me was actually that it was not a need-to-have feature for the product launch. There might be a different view on the file services option in the future.
I am very impressed by these guys. They bring a ton of experience into the company which is transfered into their products. It is clear the products are functional and quite complete, but a couple of relevant features are still missing. The relevance is dependent on the size and level of operations of the client looking into this product. Smaller customer might not be depending on SNMP alerting or 10GbE interfaces. These features and the aforementioned features are sure to be introduced shortly after this launch.
The Nimble Storage guys presenting at Tech Field Day are brave in my book. They come in to present a new company and new products to a group of tech guys that could give them a really hard time, but they stood tall, and gave us a very great presentation. They definitely believe in their product, and at the same time respect their competition.
I will be watching them closely.
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