Nimble adds to all-flash arrays with entry-level AF1000

Nimble Storage has made a further foray into all-flash storage with the addition of an entry-level array, the AF1000, to its portfolio.

The AF1000 is offered at “under $40,000” (£31,000) and comes in a base model of 4U with between 6TB and 46TB of raw capacity. With assumed data reduction of 5x those capacities are increased to 20TB and 165TB.

The addition of the AF1000 follows on from Nimble’s huge leap into the all-flash market – having hitherto made its name as a hybrid-flash array supplier – with four all-flash products in February 2016. These were the AF3000, AF5000, AF7000 and AF9000.

In doing this, Nimble followed an apparent trend among startups that built their name on hybrid flash storage, which saw them add all-flash capabilities to their portfolios. Fellow hybrid flash startups Tegile and Tintri added all-flash in 2014 and 2015.

For the Nimble AF1000, I/O performance weighs in at 40,000 IOPS for read only and 35,000 IOPS for a 70/30 read/write split. Connectivity is via four 1Gbps/10Gbps Ethernet (iSCSI) ports, with four more or four 8/16Gbps Fibre Channel also possible.

A maximum of one expansion shelf can be added to provide raw capacity of between 6TB and 184TB (20TB to 685TB usable with data reduction).

Data protection on drives is via Nimble’s own Triple+ Parity Raid; standard Raid levels with parity – 5 and 6 – offer single and double parity. This amount of parity data writing seems to have some overhead in terms of capacity, so stated raw and usable capacities are reduced by about 25% to give effective capacity.

All Nimble’s all-flash offerings use the same operating system and can be clustered together in scale-up or scale-out mode to provide up to around 8PB of capacity.

Meanwhile Nimble also announced upgrades to its CS series hybrid flash arrays – CS1000, CS3000, CS5000 and CS7000  – that have resulted in improvements to performance and capacity utilisation.