Nimble Scale-Out - The Curtain is Drawn - Part I

Hi Friends,

In today's blog I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the new features available with Nimble Scale-Out.  When you get your first storage array it's great, you've got your GUI or CLI and you're ready to go!  But then you get your second and it too has a GUI, which is okay.  Then a 3rd with another GUI, which is starting to get confusing.  Let's top is off with a fourth which, it too has it's own GUI.  Did I just delete the volume on Array 1 or Array 4?  Ugh oh....

You get my point, when you have multiple GUI's open, it starts to get a bit confusing.  The cool thing about Scale-Out is you have one GUI, and you don't have to download a separate tool to administer your cluster!  Yep, it's all built in.  Basically you elect one array to be your leader and it's the first one to join the cluster.  As others join they give up their ability to have a separate front end GUI, since you'll be using the "leaders" IP address to administer from 1 to 4 arrays.

What if you want the ability to have a single pane of administration glass, but prefer each array to be their own entity.  You're not ready to start striping volumes or use some of the newer features.  That's okay!  Scale-Out isn't an all or nothing upgrade, you can jump into the deep end or slowly get your feet wet at the shallow end of the pool.

How about some pictures?

Here's we've got a single array called Anooba.  It's group is called t1 (I'll get into groups a little later on) and it's the only array in the group.  We'll click on the Add Array to Group button and....

We get a box that shows us the available 2.x arrays available on the network.  Pretty cool huh?  Click on the one you want to add, here I select Bantha.  Click on the Add button.

What?!  A password dialog!?!  Yep, believe me, this is a GOOD thing, you don't want arrays magically appearing in your cluster.

After you enter your password for the array you're trying to add to the cluster, click Connect.

Check it out!  Both arrays are there.  Was it really that easy?  Well, I cheated a little.  There are some networking considerations that you need to be aware of when adding arrays to your cluster, but that's for another blog.  Hey, I gotta get you coming back!

Until Next Time,
-Brain