Nimble Storage Announces the Availability of its Fibre Channel SAN Solution

Nimble Storage recently advanced their Adaptive Flash Platform with the release of Fibre Channel protocol support for the CS-series storage arrays. This release marks a significant milestone for Nimble Storage as it enables them to effectively address storage requirements that are enterprise-wide as well as quadruple the amount of markets they can serve. Nimble Storage also announced the doubling of the maximum capacity of their storage systems to support up to 1.6PBs of raw capacity and 160TB of flash per cluster.

Fibre Channel options are available for the CS300, CS500, and CS700 series arrays. The CS300 arrays offer 1 dual-port 16 GB FC NICs, the CS500 arrays offer 1 or 2 dual-port 16 GB FC NICs, and the CS700 arrays offer 2 or 3 dual-port 16 GB FC NICs.  Each of these CS-series arrays also has the option for additional 1GbE, 10GbE SFP+, or 10GbaseT cards.

So far, Nimble Storage has successfully completed 40 deployments as a part of their beta program to effectively test and validate the expanded protocol support in real environments. These tests revealed high levels of satisfaction including ease of deployment and the ability to consolidate a broad range of enterprise applications and workloads. Other results included radically better price-performance, reduced footprint, the convenience of managing multiple arrays as a single scale-out SAN, the dramatic simplicity of snapshot-based backups and replication for DR, as well as the benefits of InfoSight’s cloud-based support and management. This beta test was so successful that Nimble Storage released it a full quarter ahead of schedule. The addition of Fibre Channel to the Adaptive Flash platform has allowed Nimble Storage customers to speed up the transition from disk-centric to flash-centric architectures.