Nimble Storage Gets Aggressive on Entry Point Pricing with New Predictive Flash Array

New All Flash Array Offers Superior Scalability Starting under $40K USD with 3 Years of Support; New Generation of Adaptive Flash Arrays Deliver Up To 2X Performance Improvement and 40% Lower Cost of Capacity

Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL), the leader in predictive flash, today announced an aggressive entry point to all-flash storage. The new AF1000 is a full-featured all-flash array that offers superior scaling. Customers can start small and scale non-disruptively up to 8PB at a substantially lower cost. Nimble also introduced a new generation of Adaptive Flash arrays with significantly improved price-performance and price-capacity benefits across the portfolio. All Nimble arrays include InfoSight Predictive Analytics to predict and prevent storage and non-storage issues across the infrastructure stack.

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The starting point for an AF1000 has up to 20TB effective capacity and is expandable up to 165TB effective capacity in 4U. It can also scale-up and scale-out non-disruptively to achieve over 1.2M IOPS and 8PB of all-flash capacity. Because every Nimble All Flash and Adaptive Flash array runs the same NimbleOS, management and functionality is identical and arrays of any type can be clustered and managed as a single entity in a Unified Flash Fabric. Customers who use All Flash for primary applications can leverage Adaptive Flash for backup, disaster recovery, and archival at a third of the cost of All Flash.

Nimble Storage Price-Performance Advantage

Nimble CS-Series Adaptive Flash arrays deliver flexible performance and capacity for mixed mainstream workloads at one-third the total cost of ownership of legacy hybrid arrays. Built with the same NimbleOS, they can be clustered with Nimble All Flash arrays and managed as a single entity in a Unified Flash Fabric. In this way, applications can be transparently migrated between All Flash and Adaptive Flash.

The new portfolio consists of the CS1000, CS3000, CS5000 and CS7000 and delivers up to 2X performance improvement and 40% lower cost of capacity over the previous generation of Adaptive Flash arrays. The new high-end CS7000 array achieves up to 230K IOPS and scales to over 2.4 PB of effective capacity. Nimble All Flash arrays already benefit from inline variable block de-duplication and compression. De-duplication is planned for the Adaptive Flash arrays in a future release at no cost for existing customers who maintain an active support contract.

The new Adaptive Flash arrays are designed to suit a broad range of primary applications. They can also be built in highly cost-optimized configurations to achieve a preferred platform for secondary storage. When primary applications are on a Nimble All Flash array, an Adaptive Flash array can be used for backup, disaster recovery and archival at a third of the cost of All Flash. The new generation of Adaptive Flash arrays extend this capability further by delivering better price-performance for these secondary workloads.

Each Nimble Storage array includes InfoSight Predictive Analytics to predict and prevent issues across the infrastructure stack. The customer support experience is transformed because tasks handled by traditional Level 1 and 2 support staff are automated. The Nimble support organization is made up entirely of Level 3 experts that answer calls in less than a minute on average. The most complex issues are rapidly resolved because InfoSight already has the information required to solve the problem.

Timeless Guarantee Applied to Entire Predictive Flash Platform
Timeless storage is an innovative new business model built on trust and transparency. Every Nimble array comes with all-inclusive software licensing, guaranteed flat support pricing for the life of the product, no forklift upgrades and a seven-year lifespan on SSDs. There is also an option where after three years, a customer receives a free new controller that is guaranteed to be at least 25 percent faster when they renew support for an additional three years.

The AF1000 MSRP starts under $40,000 USD including three years of support.