Talked to Nimble Storage a few months ago. The 1st time they sounded cool and now I know why.
What they do
Nimble builds a converged storage appliance out of commodity hard drives and SSDs that offers high performance – is there any other kind? – and iSCSI, backup, a form of dedup and WAN replication. The pitch is EqualLogic & Data Domain merged into a single low-cost appliance. Only better.
- iSCSI + dedup
- Capacity-optimized snapshots
- SATA + flash instead of high-rpm drives
- Can run off a remote snapshot
EL & DD sell a lot of kit, so this could work.
Claim to fame
Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout is what Nimble calls their secret sauce.
CASL combines a variable block size, in-line compression, application-specific block sizes and checksum and compression data kept in the block header. They coalesce the blocks and only write in full stripes to disk.
The box has a large flash-based cache where the full stripe writes are also written, overcoming the small write performance hit that flash shares with parity raid. This also insures a high percentage of cache hits on the first read.
The system maintains an index of where all the blocks are written. Typically, this index is also held in flash for maximum lookup performance.
App-specific block sizes
Nimble uses of variable block sizes to improve performance. For example, the last three versions of exchange have all used different block sizes. CASL recognizes the different versions of Exchange and dynamically adjusts its block size to the best fit.
They claim a 2x performance advantage on Exchange databases.
Coalesce
They take the variable size blocks then coalesce those blocks into big chunks and write to flash. They write in large blocks – full block writes to flash and in full stripe writes to disk. Result: fast reads & writes across both media
Their page sizes are variable but small, ranging from 4KB to 64KB. The greater granularity means that frequent snapshots are much smaller than large page size systems like EqualLogic.
The StorageMojo take
There’s no reason that data protection should be separate from data storage. We’ve been moving towards integration since the CDP craze.
The average business wants to store and protect their data and they don’t want to spend much time or money on it. Nor should they.
With powerful commodity processors and nickel-per-GB storage there’s a huge market for a box that – or 2 or 3 boxes – that
- Stores terabytes of data
- Protects that data with local replication and frequent snapshots
- Auto-connects to cloud storage for DR and archiving
- Doesn’t confuse users with LUNs and stripes
- Offers Time Machine like data recovery to end users
It will look like magic – as any sophisticated technology should – and you’ll buy it at Office Max. As with any volume product the key will be architecting to maximize the user experience at an affordable price point.
Nimble certainly has the right idea.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. I don’t know which analyst the Nimble guys are blowing their money on, but it isn’t me.
Hmm; a lot of that functionality reads like a feature list of ZFS.
Whoopee!!!
One more river (mental barrier) crossed…
RE: “…reads like a feature list of ZFS”
There should be a lot of “ZFS like” functionality coming soon.
ZFS is a really good interim step to Information/Data handling independence. It is almost the only one. Certainly in Production.
I would like to see Information/Data handling separated from the Operating System. As more Information is moved to object stores and with the “rise of clouds” this will be a “river to cross” soon.
Maybe it would be best to use objects to form “concept stores” based on “How we do business around here”? I worked on some systems that looked first at the request then at the applications available and last at the Information/Data stores available in that Information/Data space. The process then programmed itself to deliver a unique solution to that request. The hardware was easily overwhelmed at all levels once multiple requests had to be satisfied.
Not today. You could enable the system to develop its own “process persistence” rules for rapid replication of that process.
Just a thought…
@David, I thought exactly that, and good on them for it. I do await seeing it at Office Max. There’s not much but Drobo that has penetrated low enough with relatively sophisticated technology in this space. Mine is sometimes dog slow, but completely reliable! (Granted I’m treating the low end model more like the high end with my workload…)
Yeah, looks like some1 spotted the same opening that Openstorage and other storage vendors using ZFS are using…
David, Robert, Jukka —
At first glance, Nimble’s CASL may sound similar to ZFS, but CASL is unique and offers several advantages over ZFS. I’ve written a brief overview comparing different filesystem architectures that you can read here:
http://www.nimblestorage.com/blog/a-comparison-of-filesystem-architectures/
Umesh Maheshwari
Co-Founder and CTO, Nimble Storage
We’ve been testing it in house for the last six months or so and just placed our order today. Quite simply it is awesome. Super easy management, all of the expected features, performance exceeding expectations, and capacity per dollar that we couldn’t get anywhere else (excluding jbod of course). Granted we had a bit of a discount for being beta testers but it’s a great solution and worth a look for anyone looking at EQL or Lefthand style/sized solutions.
If I had one complaint – well not even a complaint – but our compression rations (so far) are nowhere near the 2x expectation. Obviously mileage will vary and our “measly” 1.3x compression wasn’t a big factor in the decision to purchase.
It’s also refreshing to have a company on the ball so much you feel like their only customer 🙂
Seriously. Check it out for yourselves.
@ChrisFricke, i’d be interested i hear a bit more about your experience with the device.. How many systems are accessing the device and some other specifics.
John
The also have a great techincal team. Our Exchange environment was a real mess. The Nimble SE is top notch. Experienced, great to work with and responsive. cant say enough great things.
Here are some real world numbers on efficiency
http://www.ciosolutions.com/real-world-data-nimble-storage-snapshot-and-thin-provisioning-efficiency/