vForum is a great chance to view the latest release of virtualization products from VMware as well as getting a great strategic insight into the future roadmap of enterprise computing. Hot topics this year include Workforce Mobility, Hybrid Cloud, Cloud Security and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). With the recent release of vSphere 5.5 there are bound to be some great sessions on the new features and capabilities.
As always there is an amazing amount of content and activities available for delegates – get a feel for the latest software releases via the Hands-on Labs, attend the general sessions or take your VCP or VCAP certification exams (remember they are 75% off regular price!). Choosing which sessions to attend (or which to miss L) is always a challenge. Here are my picks:
vForum is also a great opportunity to view the latest technology trends in the industry. At booth #L14, Nimble Storage will highlight our flash-optimised hybrid storage solutions. Watch one of our live demonstrations and witness 18,000 IOPS from just 8 SATA hard drives in a 3U storage appliance!
Live Demos from Nimble Storage during breakouts at booth #L14:
Attend any of our live demos during the breakout times listed above, and pick up a NimbleDisruptors t-shirt!
More prizes? Have your chance to win one of three Gaming Headsets valued over $300 by entering into our prize draw!
Join in the conversation on Twitter by following @NimbleStorageAU or by using the hashtag #nimblestorageau.
Want more chances to win? Share our content, post a photo or promote our live demo times via Twitter – to submit double entries into our prize draw!
]]>Storage Networking World
The first event is Storage Networking World, taking place Oct 15 – 17 in Long Beach – we’ll be at kiosk #A15. If you’re interested in storage solutions for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), be sure to attend the session by one of our customers, Daniel Kwong of Sacramento City College, who will deliver a presentation on “Key Storage Strategies for Getting The Most out of Your VDI Deployments.” Daniel will discuss his path to VDI, covering topics that include business drivers, return on investment, and storage needs. He will also discuss how Nimble Storage enabled his VDI environment, which helps serves the college’s 25,000 students and 5,000 staff. The session will take place Tuesday, Oct. 15 from 5:00 pm – 5:40 pm.
EDUCAUSE
Next week, we’ll also be at EDUCAUSE, which runs from Oct 16 – 17 in Anaheim. EDUCAUSE focuses on the best IT solutions for higher education, and we’ll be there to showcase how Nimble Storage arrays are a great fit for the storage needs of educational institutions – from running critical applications, to desktop and server virtualization workloads. Come visit us there at booth #727 to find out more.
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The Nimble Storage stand was in the middle of “Storage Avenue” which was great fun for 3000 delegates to see the old and the new storage architectures. The level of interest throughout the four days was amazing. Even with six people on the Nimble Storage stand, we had delegates joining in on conversations, so they could learn more. With my CS210 array on the stand punching out 16,000 random 4K IOPS, many were impressed and curious how Nimble Storage could deliver this performance.
John Whyte delivered great demos each day, which always drew a crowd. The realisation of how CPU performance advancements compare with mechanical hard disk performance advancements was causing penny’s to drop. It’s something most IT professionals know about, but don’t realise until it’s visually compared. It’s a challenge that Nimble Storage has met, built a storage architecture from the ground up and solved.
What projects were most people talking about? VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). Over and over this is what people would be enquiring about, and Nimble Storage fits this solution like a glove. It was great to be able to talk about the challenges some organisations are facing with their VDI infrastructure, like boot storms and AV scanning, and show how with Nimble Storage these concerns are history.
Lots of really cool technologies were on show, including 3D printing systems. To see someone scanned by a XBOX 360 Connect controller, a 3D model of their head and shoulders created and bust of them printed out of plastic, was amazing.
Microsoft organised this fantastic event, which all delegates agreed was delivering the right mix of information, entertainment and education. Thanks go to Microsoft for this great event and I look forward to attending next year.
By the way, Australia’s Gold Coast is always spectacular in September.
]]>Battling the laws of physics and Moore’s “law”, chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD have over the past decade shifted their focus from speeding up CPU clocks to increasing CPU core density. This transition has been painful for storage industry incumbents, whose software stacks had been developed in the 1990s to be “single threaded”, and therefore have needed years of painstaking effort to adapt to multi-core CPUs. Architectures developed after about 2005 have typically been multithreaded from the beginning, to take advantage of growing core densities.
One of the more interesting aspects of recent vendor announcements is just how long it has taken storage industry behemoths to upgrade their products to accommodate multi-core CPUs – judging by all the hoopla these are big engineering feats. Even a fully multi-threaded architecture like Nimble Storage’s CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout) needs software optimizing whenever there is a big jump in CPU core density to take full advantage of the added horsepower. The difference is that for Nimble these are maintenance releases (not announcement-worthy major or minor releases). We routinely deliver new hardware with the needed resiliency levels, and then add a series of software optimizations over subsequent maintenance releases to squeeze out significant performance gains.
Here’s an example of what’s been accomplished in the 1.4.x release train over the last several months. Nimble customers have particularly appreciated that these performance improvements were made available as non-disruptive firmware upgrades (no downtime), and did not require any additional disk shelves or SSDs (more on how we do this below).
Beyond Multi-Threading
Multi-core readiness is nice, but there is an even more fundamental distinction between architectures. Using CPU cores more efficiently in a “spindle bound” architecture still leaves it a spindle bound architecture. In other words, if your performance was directly proportional to the number of high RPM disks (or expensive SSDs), improved CPU utilization and more CPU cores may raise the limits of the system, but will still leave you needing the exact same number of high RPM disks or SSDs to achieve the same performance. So meeting high random IO performance requirements still takes ungodly amounts of racks full of disk shelves, even with a smattering of SSDs.
The Nimble Storage architecture actually does something very different – it takes advantage of the plentiful CPU cores (and flash) to transform storage performance (IOPS) from a “spindle count” problem to a CPU core problem, allowing us to deliver extremely high performance levels with very few low RPM disks and commodity flash, and achieving big gains in price/performance and density to boot (in many cases needing 1/10th the hardware of competing architectures).
Similarly, the availability of more CPU cores does little to fix other fundamental limitations in some older architectures, such as compression algorithms that are constrained by disk IO performance, or heavy-duty snapshots that carry big performance (and in some cases capacity) penalties.
Thinking Outside the (Commodity) Box
It’s always good to raise the performance limits of the storage controllers, because this allows you to deliver more performance from a single storage node (improving manageability for large scale IT environments). Here again though, many (though not all) of the older architectures have a fundamental limitation – they can only use a limited number of CPU cores in a system if they want to leverage commodity hardware designs (e.g. standard Intel motherboards). A solution to this problem has been known for a long time – a horizontal clustering (scale-out) architecture. This approach allows a single workload to span the CPU resources of multiple commodity hardware enclosures, while maintaining the simplicity of managing a single storage entity or system. In the long run, this is the capability that allows an architecture to scale performance cost-efficiently without expensive, custom-built refrigerator-like hardware. This can also allow multiple generations of hardware to co-exist in one pool, with seamless load balancing and non-disruptive data migration, thus eliminating the horrendous “forklift” upgrades one of these recent vendor announcements promises to put their customers through.
So, while congratulations are in order to the engineering teams at our industry peers who worked so hard on making aging architectures multi-core ready, this is just a small step forward while the industry has moved ahead by leaps and bounds.
]]>For some it will be a chance to learn new development techniques. For others, it will be a first peek under the covers of new software versions, and to understand the new features available and how to plan to integrate them into the IT environment. From this perspective, here are a few sessions that look quite interesting:
We are thrilled to be a part of this year’s inaugural Gold Coast Microsoft Tech Ed event. Join us at booth #32 to learn how Nimble Storage delivers outstanding performance with its Flash-Optimised Hybrid Storage solutions. Experience the impactful difference of Nimble Storage Solutions for Microsoft Applications at our live demonstrations scheduled during break times across the duration of the conference.
Live Demos from Nimble Storage during Breakouts at Booth #32:
Attend any of our live demos during the breakout times listed above, and pick up a NimbleDisruptors t-shirt!
More prizes? Have your chance to win one of three Gaming Headsets valued over $300 by entering into our prize draw!
Join in the conversation on Twitter by following @NimbleStorageAU or by using the hashtag #nimblestorageau.
Want more chances to win? Share our content, post a photo or promote our live demo times via Twitter – to submit double entries into our prize draw!
]]>It’s been a busy year around here. Since VMworld last August, Nimble Storage has:
If you’re going to VMworld, come by our booth, #921, and see for yourself what the buzz is about – we’d love to catch up with you on all the latest happenings at Nimble Storage, and hear your thoughts on storage and virtualization as well. If you’re rushed for time, our recurring in-booth presentations will tell you what you need to know in a matter of minutes, on topics that include the breakthrough CASL architecture, our SmartStack solutions, and InfoSight.
This year we’ll have specific stations with live demos and experts focused on four topics: end user computing, business critical applications, InfoSight, and a tech preview where we’ll give you an early sneak peek at some of the amazing things our engineers are working on in their labs. And our “Brainiac Bar” will have our top technical experts waiting, whiteboard marker in hand, to answer your most pressing storage questions.
The VMworld conference sessions are one of the key reasons attendees make the trip. Here are a few we’re especially excited about and think you may find valuable:
VMworld promises to be a great event this year, and we really hope to see you there. So don’t forget to come by and visit Nimble Storage at booth #921 – you may even get lucky and get a chance to drive around in a Maserati convertible for a couple of weeks!
See you in San Francisco!
]]>Huy learned recently that the customer wanted to increase the performance of the system – three years after the initial system had been deployed.
First, the customer replaced all of the old flash solid state drives (SSDs) in the system to higher capacity SSDs during the day, watching the amount of cache increase, even as the system continued operations with no disruption to any applications. That evening, Huy arrived and pulled out the old controller and popped in a new, higher performance CS420 controller. He then failed back to the upgraded controller, and replaced the second older controller with a newer CS420 controller. No downtime or disruption to any application, and the performance was now three times higher than with the CS220! The system was now brand new, ready to chug along for several more years.
Having been in the storage industry for a long time, I know that non-disruptive software upgrades are marketed far more often than they are truly realized in customer data centers. Non-disruptive controller upgrades and cache upgrades are non-existent within mid-range enterprise storage systems. This is one of the many capabilities of our architecture that is allowing us to earn customer appreciation and build a strong customer community!
]]>Nimble has partnered with Cisco to bring to market the Nimble Storage SmartStack, an integrated solution including best-of-breed storage, servers, networking, and virtualization technology. Working closely together, Cisco and Nimble have jointly produced reference architectures that have been tested for interoperability, performance, and fast deployment.
Cisco and Nimble pre-validated SmartStack solutions have also been developed in collaboration with Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft to address both desktop virtualization, and server virtualization for private cloud deployments. Storage is not purchased in silos, so we’ve developed reference architectures with the key industry-leading ecosystem partners to provide a complete range of solutions.
Come by booth #225 to learn how SmartStack solutions can help your organization accelerate deployments and reduce risk, improve IT productivity, and flexibly scale as needs change. Nimble Storage hybrid arrays will also be featured in the Cisco Unified Data Center Partner Ecosystem Technology Demonstration, so be sure to visit us there as well.
To learn more and to have a chance at winning a $100 Amazon gift card, check out our special Cisco Live site that’s filled with great content, such as product briefs, details on our reference architectures, and SmartStack customer case studies: http://info.nimblestorage.com/cisco-live-2013-nimble-storage.html
See you in Orlando!
]]>This past week, I was fortunate to travel to Indonesia and participate in our launch activities there along with my colleagues Peter O’Connor (Nimble Storage’s vice president for the APAC region), Rachel Ler (ASEAN Sales Manager), and Daniel Tan (Channel Manager for ASEAN).
Indonesia has a growing economy with a real requirement for storage solutions that provide higher performing, capacity-optimised solutions in a smaller footprint. Based on many of the conversations we had, datacenter space is becoming an issue for many organisations, as well as the skyrocketing costs of electricity. The feedback we were given was that our technology is welcomed in the local market and couldn’t have arrived at a better time.
Our visit began with a series of detailed planning sessions with our local distribution partner, discussing how we can best service and support our customers across Indonesia. We came up with plenty of creative ideas that I’m sure our customers will love. In the afternoon we were lucky enough to present to 35 local resellers who understood the true value of our technology and quickly identified that Nimble Storage is the right solution for many of their customers in the local market. I was so impressed with their knowledge and the types of questions they asked.
The official launch took place the following day at Planet Hollywood, starting with a presentation to more than 20 press and media agencies. Peter spoke briefly about our organisation and I spoke a little further about our solutions and the value it provides customers. Similar to the reseller event, the questions and discussion afterwards proved to me that we could not have arrived at a better time. Seeing the press so excited about our organisation is a good sense of validation.
That afternoon more than 30 customers attending the launch, where we discussed our unique approach to storage, describing the typical customer scenarios we see daily and how our technology can address those challenges. Post presentation we were all able to dine together on some local cuisine, talking in detail about what makes Nimble Storage so different.
Reflecting back, it was an amazing trip – meeting wonderful people, establishing important relationships, and enjoying the extraordinary sights of Indonesia.
]]>For Nimble Storage, this is our first year as an exhibitor at the show and we couldn’t be more excited. Join us in our booth #2523 to experience first-hand the efficiency, performance, and functionality the Nimble Storage CS-Series of hybrid storage systems can deliver for Windows environments. Our booth demos will include SmartStack for Windows Server, along with solutions for Exchange, SQL Server, and file serving using Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Nimble Storage.
That’s not all – you’ll have a chance to enter our daily raffle for a $100 Amazon gift card, just for joining the conversation. You can also connect with us and ask questions on Twitter by following @nimblestorage or by using the hash tag #nimblestorage.
See you in The Big Easy!
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