Nimble Cloud Volumes Removing Risk From Cloud Storage

As of February 27th 2017, Nimble Storage announced Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV), marking Nimble’s entry into the cloud space.

For those short on time: Nimble Cloud Volumes is block storage as a service, works with compute from AWS & Azure, and avoids the significant block storage drawbacks of those two providers. In essence, it is enterprise storage as a service, at a competitive price, while retaining all the cloud conveniences.

NCV works with AWS and Azure

Why get in the Storage as a Service space?

People like subscription-based cloud offerings for various reasons. Mostly due to convenience, agility and economies of scale. Plus, of course, converting all expenses into OPEX. But this is not a treatise on “why cloud”.

Currently, the two largest hyperscale cloud providers are AWS and Azure. While both are great offerings overall, their block storage component is severely lacking in several key aspects compared to enterprise-grade storage.

This is something that most people either are unaware of, or simply choose to accept the risk since they see the other benefits as compelling.

Knowledge is power.

Here are some of the downsides of AWS EBS and Azure block storage:

• Availability SLA: 3 nines (if an enterprise array vendor mentioned 3 nines, you’d kick them out immediately)
• Data integrity: 0.1–0.2% Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). 1–2 out of 1,000 volumes will suffer from partial or complete data loss (this is for EBS, Azure numbers N/A). If an enterprise storage vendor said they’d lose your data with a 0.2% chance per year, you’d permanently and with extreme prejudice put them on the “banned” list…
• Extremely slow (and costly) backups, clones and recoveries (for instance, many hours just to take a snapshot! And with high I/O performance variability while data is shuffled back and forth from S3)
• Hard and expensive to switch providers (by design)
• Hard and expensive to repatriate data back to a private cloud (by design)
• Significant constraints in some services might force customers to change their application layouts (1TB volume limits in Azure are unacceptably small for many deployments)
• Data mobility between cloud providers isn’t easy (by design)
• Troubleshooting & monitoring are hard. How does one do Root Cause Analysis for issues within a cloud provider? They’re designed to be black boxes. What happens when something goes wrong? How long does troubleshooting take? Can I see detailed volume statistics and trending? Why is my application suffering?

Especially for the more critical applications, the above list is enough to give people pause.

Well — what if there was a better way? A way to significantly de-risk using cloud storage? This is the reason Nimble is entering this market. To provide a way to remove some of the more significant challenges of cloud storage while keeping the best aspects of what people like about the cloud.

How did Nimble Storage build the NCV STaaS offering?

Nimble has built its own cloud to deliver the Nimble Cloud Volumes service.

The Nimble cloud is strategically placed around the world in locations in close proximity to AWS and Azure cloud infrastructure, ensuring low-latency access. The Nimble cloud is built using Nimble flash technology for storing data (i.e. it does not use the storage from either AWS or Azure). The service is managed through a simple portal and provides storage volumes that can be attached to Amazon EC2 or Azure Virtual Machine instances.

The Benefits Customers get out of Nimble Cloud Volumes

As previously mentioned, the entire goal of NCV is to keep what’s good about the cloud while at the same time removing some of the more significant risks and inconveniences. Here are the main benefits:

Easy to Consume

NCV is managed completely through an easy portal that lets users choose a capacity, performance and backup SLA, and attach to either AWS and/or Azure.

Fully Managed STaaS Offering

This is what customers expect out of the cloud. NCV is a fully managed service. The customer doesn’t have to ever touch and maintain a storage array, physical or virtualized.

Extreme Reliability

The NCV storage uptime is the same as what Nimble enterprise arrays provide: a measured 6+ nines.

The data integrity is even more impressive at millions of times more than what native cloud block storage provides. More details here.

Enterprise Copy Data Management

Instant snapshots and clones. Instant recoveries. In addition, we only charge for delta usage when making clones, not full copies. Which means you can take many, many clones of something and the initial cost is almost zero. Only pay for the IOPS and additional data you consume as the clones deviate from the original. At scale, the savings can be significant.

Provisioned IOPS, Low Latency plus Auto QoS

Everyone expects an IOPS SLA from a STaaS offering. We do of course offer an IOPS SLA with NCV.

But we also take it to the next level by automatically prioritizing the right I/O using heuristics. That way, even if you are hitting your QoS limit, the right kind of I/O will still get prioritized automatically.

For instance, automatically prioritize latency-sensitive DB I/O vs latency-insensitive sequential I/O. Both because it makes sense and because nobody has the time to deal with micromanaging QoS. More here.

Easy Mobility Eliminates Cloud Lock-In

This is a big one. We make the following things easy and possible:

1. Cloud on-off ramp: easily and quickly send your data to the cloud. Want to stop using the cloud? That’s also easy and fast. And there are no egress charges.
2. Multicloud without lock-in: easily use multiple public cloud offerings (and switch between them) without needing to migrate data.
3. Hybrid Cloud Portability: Easy to mix and match private and public cloud. Easily move data back to on-premises private cloud if needed. Easily burst what you need to the cloud.

Global Visibility with Predictive Analytics

Last, but by no means least: We are extending InfoSight to the cloud. The service that massively lowers business risk for Nimble private cloud customers will now also be available to public cloud consumers.

• Predict and prevent issues across the stack: Because it’s really about the applications, not just the storage. Pinpoint difficult issues quickly, even if they have nothing whatsoever to do with storage.
• Visibility no matter where your data is: It shouldn’t matter whether your data is in the public or private cloud or both. Have detailed visibility into your data including exotic things like I/O histograms or more pedestrian (but still useful) things like detailed trending analysis.
• Predict, recommend, optimize: Use Predictive Analytics to go beyond reporting and use the information to optimize data placement — which could end up saving you money.

Finally, the cloud stops being a black box when problems arise.

In Summary

The Nimble Cloud Volumes service was built to address some significant shortcomings AWS and Azure block storage services have, while retaining the benefits people expect from the cloud and providing much more flexibility to customers.

NCV provide benefits such as increased reliability, predictability, faster backups and clones, plus integration with the best infrastructure analytics platform, InfoSight.

Some example methods of deployment:

• Production in private cloud, DR in public cloud
• Test/Dev in public cloud
• “All In” public cloud

We are accepting beta customers now (several big names already using it). Go here to take a look and sign up.

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