Tag: Nimble

Posted on

HPE Alletra 6000 – Nimble Evolved

HPE Alletra

I’m very excited to announce that the evolution of HPE Nimble Storage is now available.

The new line is called Alletra 6000, and is completely interoperable with Nimble and manageable both from its own GUI/CLI/API and Data Services Cloud Console. For the Alletra 9000 (the evolution of Primera) there will be a separate post.

All the usual goodies of Nimble are still there (6-nines guaranteed uptime, fancy direct-to-L3 support, InfoSight with infrastructure AI recommendations, 100% headroom even if running on one controller, SCM cache, Triple+ RAID, Cascade Multistage Checksums etc). What’s different is mostly the vastly increased speeds in real-world workloads, and the shorter form factor.

Continue reading “HPE Alletra 6000 – Nimble Evolved”
Posted on

Modern RAID Must Protect Against Multiple Temporally Correlated Errors

Modern data protection needs to adapt to protecting modern media. RAID is no exception. In this article I will explain why modern storage consumers need to be asking for certain kinds of protection and not settling for less.

To summarize, don’t bother with storage that can’t provide at least dual parity protection for any given piece of data (whether that’s an array, HCI or the cloud, it doesn’t matter).

Why? Two big reasons:

  1. Because media these days is both larger and fails differently than in the past. Which means Temporally Correlated Errors are far more likely to happen, so you need protection against those. It’s not doom-mongering. It’s based on data.
  2. In the olden days, arrays had small RAID groups that each held a handful of volumes. If something was damaged in a RAID group, at most you’d just lose that handful of volumes. Modern arrays use pools of space, typically made up of multiple RAID groups. This means that you can potentially damage all volumes in an array merely by losing data integrity in a single RAID group in the pool. I’m sure you aren’t exactly looking forward to experiencing that.

I will take you step by step through this, as is my idiom. It is though rather sad that I have to write this kind of thing in 2020…

Continue reading “Modern RAID Must Protect Against Multiple Temporally Correlated Errors”

Posted on

HPE Memory-Driven Architectures Extend to 3PAR and Nimble Storage

HPE has been innovating in the Memory-Driven Compute space for a while now (for example, HPE Labs’ The Machine project and Gen-Z ).

The driver behind this has been to transform application performance, not by increments but by leaps and bounds. Think orders of magnitude in reduction of execution time. For instance, at an organization performing Alzheimer’s cure research, they had a certain key analytics operation that took 22 minutes for each iteration (and they need to do many, many iterations). With a Memory-Driven system from HPE it now takes 13 seconds. This allows the researchers to reach useful results much faster – which, in turn, means the cure could materialize in a much shorter timeframe.

Continue reading “HPE Memory-Driven Architectures Extend to 3PAR and Nimble Storage”

Posted on

When Terrified Vendors Attack: The Dell Edition

It recently came to my attention that Dell is now advertising some kind of benchmark that shows one of their platforms can be faster than Nimble in some very specific test of their own concoction.

While I don’t doubt that’s possible (indeed, we could do it the other way around), it may be worthwhile investigating what’s prompting the attack.

I also wanted to point out the various technically fishy points of the benchmark.

Continue reading “When Terrified Vendors Attack: The Dell Edition”

Posted on

How Nimble Storage Systems do Block Folding

I got the idea for this post after seeing certain vendors claim they were the first and only with certain data reduction technologies (I’m not talking about dedupe and compression). I thought – how come Nimble never made a big deal about this? After all, what those vendors were claiming didn’t seem to be very interesting compared to how Nimble systems efficiently write data… yet those vendors were acting as if they’d cured a particularly virulent disease.

Executive Summary

Nimble systems naturally avoid any wasted space when writing. This is an inherent part of the design and not something that was added later.

Continue reading “How Nimble Storage Systems do Block Folding”

Posted on

InfoSight: How Nimble Customers Benefit from AI and Big Data Predictive Analytics

In past articles I have covered topics about how Nimble Storage lowers customer risk with technologies internal to the array such as:

Now, it’s time to write a more in-depth article about the immense customer benefits of InfoSight, Nimble’s Predictive Analytics platform.

Continue reading “InfoSight: How Nimble Customers Benefit from AI and Big Data Predictive Analytics”

Posted on

Nimble Cloud Volumes Removing Risk From Cloud Storage

As of February 27th 2017, Nimble Storage announced Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV), marking Nimble’s entry into the cloud space.

For those short on time: Nimble Cloud Volumes is block storage as a service, works with compute from AWS & Azure, and avoids the significant block storage drawbacks of those two providers. In essence, it is enterprise storage as a service, at a competitive price, while retaining all the cloud conveniences.

Continue reading “Nimble Cloud Volumes Removing Risk From Cloud Storage”

Posted on

Practical Considerations for Implementing NVMe Storage

Before we begin, something needs to be clear: Although dual-ported NVMe drives are not yet cost effective, the architecture of Nimble Storage is NVMe-ready today. And always remember that in order to get good benefits from NVMe, one needs to implement it all the way from the client. Doing NVMe only at the array isn’t as effective.

Continue reading “Practical Considerations for Implementing NVMe Storage”

Posted on

Going Green: Why I Joined Nimble Storage

I am proud to announce that, as of today, I am a member of the Nimble Storage team.

Nimble Logo

This marks the end of an era – I spent quite a bit of time at NetApp: learned a lot, did a lot – by the end I had my hands in all kinds of sausage making… 🙂

I wish my friends at NetApp the best of luck for the future. The storage industry is a very tough arena, and one that will be increasingly harder and with less tolerance than ever before.

Continue reading “Going Green: Why I Joined Nimble Storage”