News

Nimble Storage Offers All-Flash Entry Point

• By David Ramel
• 08/11/2016

Enterprises looking for an entry point into all-flash storage are the target of a new offering from Nimble Storage, which specializes in predictive flash.

The company positioned its new AF1000 all-flash array as a full-featured solution ideal for smaller companies looking to get started with the technology.

"Mid-size and large enterprises love the performance and availability of the All Flash arrays we released in February," said exec Ajay Singh in a statement yesterday. "However, many smaller organizations want all-flash at a lower entry point, without sacrificing features and scalability. The new Nimble All Flash array makes it affordable for organizations of any size to benefit from an all-flash platform with the same capabilities and scalability found in high-end all-flash arrays. The AF1000 is an 'entry-level' all-flash array without limitations."

Product manager Dev Datta explained more about the new offering in a blog post yesterday.

"While All Flash has mostly been deployed in high-performance environments, as the market has evolved, it has become clear that some customers do not need hundreds of thousands of IOPS but still desire an entry-level All Flash array with consistent sub-millisecond latency," Datta said. "Today, we are addressing that need with the introduction of a new entry-level All Flash array, the AF1000. The new AF1000 MSRP starts under $40K, including 3 years of support."

The company said the AF1000 has a starting point of up to 20TB of effective capacity, expandable up to 165TB in a 4U configuration and able to achieve more than 1.2M IOPS and 8PB of all-flash capacity.

Nimble also introduced a new generation of Adaptive Flash arrays.

"Nimble CS-Series Adaptive Flash arrays deliver flexible performance and capacity for mixed mainstream workloads at one-third the total cost of ownership of legacy hybrid arrays," the company said." Built with the same NimbleOS, they can be clustered with Nimble All Flash arrays and managed as a single entity in a Unified Flash Fabric. In this way, applications can be transparently migrated between All Flash and Adaptive Flash."

The company said the new CS series features 2X performance improvement and 40 percent lower cost of capacity over its previous generation of Adaptive Flash arrays, capable of up to 230K IOPS and scaling to more than 2.4PB of effective capacity.