Nimble Storage – performance and capacity scalability

New NS controllers as well as performance and capacity scalability features were announced August 5, 2012 by Nimble Storage.

Now the Nimble CS arrays can be scaled-out by:

• SSD cache upgrade by installing high capacity SSDs
• Adding up to the three ES1 disk shelves
• Non-disruptive upgrade from CS200 to CS400 controller
• Combine several SC arrays to the clustered storage

 

The clustering feature brings Nimble Storage to the higher market level allowing compete with high-midrange solutions from other storage vendors.

It’s possible to non-disruptively add storage controllers to the cluster and remove them from it (if there’s enough free space to save data from nodes that will be removed).  Each cluster can contain one of several Dynamic Storage Pools consisting of one or several storage controllers. Volume’s data is striped across all controllers in storage pool what provides the performance boost by adding controllers to the pool. After controller is added to or removed from the pool data is automatically rebalanced between storage controllers. Also pools can be merged and volumes can be migrated between storage pools transparently for applications. 

The VMware multipathing is performed by CIM and PSP provider installed on each ESX host server. The CIM monitors paths from host to the storage cluster nodes and provides information for PSP to choose the right path for IO operations. For Windows hosts the path management is performed by the Nimble Connection Manager (NCM). The scale-out Nimble Storage clusters can also be used with other operating systems but connections between hosts and storage controller ports need to be configured manually.

The combination of the Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture and storage clustering feature makes Nimble Storage one of the most interesting players on the storage market.