Today I'd like to introduce a super cool new product put out by Nimble Storage. Scale-Out, Nimble's next gen version of storage. Yeah yeah, I'm sure you've heard that a lot and you're thinking, "Blah blah blah, show me the money!" Ever watch Looney Tunes? You're probably thinking Scale-Out is like this:
Well my friends in this case you'd be wrong! Scale-Out is much more like this:
And the great thing about about it? You can download it today! It's a release candidate that's available for download through InfoSight. And in most cases will work on your existing hardware. AH HA! You're thinking, "Most cases, meaning not my case." No, it'll probably work on your hardware too, but there's always a small percentage so it's best to check with your account team.
Okay, okay so Michigan J. Frog aside, let's talk about what's so fab about it.
A large differentiator between Nimble and other storage is it doesn't rely on spindles for performance. CPUs are cheap, we use them for our performance. Disks are just a way to store your stuff cheaply! You need more storage, add a shelf of disks. Now what if you want the ability to administer your storage from a single GUI? Stripe a volume across all of your storage controllers for smoking fast performance? The ability to evacuate an entire controller for maintenance or storage replacement with NO downtime?
Yes, friends, you get this, the car polish AND the set of knives.... Sorry couldn't help myself.
Want to know what else is cool? The GUI hardly changes too! When I did my first upgrade I thought I had done something wrong because it looked too much like 1.x Nimble.
Here's a 1.x system:
Here's a 2.x system:
At first glance, not much difference huh? I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it didn't! Now of course there are differences in there and some caveats before upgrading which I'll go through in another blog, but on the painful scale I don't think it was even a stubbed toe!
That's all folks!
-Brain
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