Nimble Storage Shatters Industry All Flash Scalability and Effective Capacity Barriers

New All Flash Arrays Powered by Samsung 3D V-NAND 4TB SSDs; Scale up to 8.2PB of Effective Capacity in a 4-Node Scale-Out Configuration


SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 23, 2016) - Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL), the leader in predictive flash storage, today announced a series of innovations including the ability to scale all flash array effective capacity to new industry heights across a new series of Nimble Storage All Flash arrays powered by Samsung 3D V-NAND-based Solid-State drives (SSDs). Enterprise IT organizations can experience absolute performance that scales to accelerate all applications across the enterprise and deliver data velocity to end users.

Nimble Storage AF-Series All Flash Arrays Support Samsung 4TB SSDs
The Nimble Storage AF9000 All Flash array, the flagship model in the all-new AF-Series, scales capacity to new industry heights with up to 553TB of raw capacity in a 12U configuration with a single array and two expansion shelves. The AF9000, a full-featured All Flash array, delivers an average de-duplication and compression ratio of 5-to-1, and up to 2.0PB of effective capacity in a 12U configuration and up to 8.2PB in a 4-node scale-out configuration. These advances in all flash array scalability and data reduction capability represent a significant step forward in effective capacity scale in comparison to competitive offerings.

"With today's announcements we are putting the storage industry on notice, leapfrogging previous scalability limitations and redefining customer expectations of all flash storage systems," said Ajay Singh, vice president of product management at Nimble Storage. "Starting today, a Nimble Storage All Flash array scale-out cluster, managed as a single entity, can non-disruptively scale to over 8PBs of effective capacity, delivering more than 1.2 million IOPS at less than 1ms response time. And with advanced data reduction capabilities that include inline variable block deduplication and compression, enterprise IT organizations can scale performance and capacity independently and non-disruptively today and well into the future."

New Hot Swappable Dual Flash Carrier Doubles Capacity
The 4U AF-Series arrays and expansion shelves are equipped with 24 SSD slots. When configured with the new Nimble Storage Dual-Flash Carrier (DFC), the capacity of each slot is doubled to a total of 48 SSDs per array and expansion shelf. Unlike competing all flash arrays, each individual SSD is hot swappable and can be installed or removed from the DFC independently, dramatically streamlining capacity scale while maintaining non-stop availability. Nimble Storage has qualified five Samsung PM863 Series SSDs, ranging in capacity from 240GB to 4TB, through a rigorous enterprise-grade Quality Assurance (QA) process to validate compatibility and interoperability across the AF-Series spanning the AF3000, AF5000, AF7000 and AF9000.

Industry Leading 3D V-NAND SSDs Optimized for Enterprise Workloads
Nimble All Flash arrays are designed to take full advantage of the 3D V-NAND innovations of the Samsung PM863 SSDs. Based on the advanced flash controllers, the PM863 SSDs provide twice the write endurance, require half the power and deliver 20 percent increased write performance compared to planar MLC-based SSDs. These high-density 2.5-inch standard form factor SSDs rely on a single Printed Circuit Board (PCB) in a 7mm form factor to provide a substantial cost advantage over competing SSD designs that use multiple PCBs in a larger 15mm form factor.

Building upon Samsung V-NAND innovations, the Nimble All Flash arrays provide advanced flash endurance software, Triple+ Parity RAID and integrated sparing to extend flash lifespan and reduce overhead inefficiencies, thereby enabling Nimble to scale all flash array and cluster effective capacity beyond the limitations of other all flash arrays.

"As an industry pioneer and leader in advanced SSD technologies, we're excited to join with innovative flash companies like Nimble to deliver the very latest storage innovations to our mutual customers," said Jim Elliott, vice president of Memory Marketing, Samsung Electronics CO., LTD "Together we're delivering a powerful combination of SSD innovations to enable Enterprise IT organizations to accelerate applications running across their data centers while providing solid investment protection and outstanding total cost of ownership."

Nimble Storage Resources

About Nimble Storage
Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) is the leader in predictive flash storage solutions. Nimble offers a Predictive Flash platform that combines flash performance with predictive analytics to predict and prevent barriers to data velocity caused by complex IT infrastructure. Nimble customers experience absolute performance, non-stop availability and cloud-like agility that accelerate critical business processes. More than 7,500 enterprises, governments, and service providers have deployed the Nimble Predictive Flash Platform across more than 50 countries. For more information visit www.nimblestorage.com and follow us on Twitter: @nimblestorage.

Nimble Storage, the Nimble Storage logo, CASL, InfoSight, SmartStack, Timeless Storage, Data Velocity Delivered, Unified Flash Fabric and NimbleConnect are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nimble Storage, Inc. Other trade names or words used in this document are the properties of their respective owners.

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