August 28, 2016
There is a shift happening in the technology industry, and we all can see it. The focus of a company’s environment is shifting from the hardware to the application itself. At the end of the day, that’s what really matters. If your application can run at peak performance without hiccups or interruptions, your hardware is doing well. The hardware itself is just the means by which we can access our apps.
The key then is to identify what obstacles could diminish your application performance and put measures in place to prevent those issues. According to research by Nimble Storage, the typical employee experiences an average of four software-related delays per work day. These delays and interruptions are called the App-Data-Gap, and Nimble Storage is committed to providing a storage solution capable of closing that gap.
Stifling Productivity and Innovation
The first consequence of the App-Data-Gap is obvious. It slows you down. Any form of interruption or delay is going to bog down the team for at least a short while, and these delays add up. Outside of this straightforward issue is a more nebulous one. The App-Data-Gap can discourage innovation.
Companies looking to deploy a new customer relationship management (CRM) tool or similarly large application may worry about the performance of the solution before it is ever deployed. It may cause them to preemptively downgrade their choice, stifle innovation, and dull their competitive edge. On top of closing the App-Data-Gap, Nimble must be able to provide a solution that also instills confidence in the capabilities of the environment.
What Causes Application Interruptions?
Nimble used their big data cloud analytics platform, Infosight, to gather intelligence on approximately 7,500 of their Nimble storage arrays in operation. Through their research, they were able to discover where most application delays originate. Their results may surprise you:
- Host, Compute, VMs — 7%
- Best Practice Errors — 8%
- Interoperability — 11%
- Configuration — 28%
- Storage Related — 46%
What’s surprising about this is just how many delays are caused by the storage array. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the majority of them still occur from other sources.
Closing the App-Data-Gap
Nimble has taken steps to refine their storage solution to close the App-Data-Gap as a much as possible. While they cannot necessarily account for many of the delays outside the storage stack, they can control their own product and offer a solution designed to work without interruption.
1. Predictive analytics
The same analytics engine that gathered the research on the App-Data-Gap can provide companies with the intelligence to overcome it. The Infosight predictive analytics platform monitors the health and performance of your array and compares it to their collection of data. By doing this, Nimble is able to identify issues in your system and bottle necks in its performance before they can become serious problems.
2. Unified flash fabric
Nimble made their name in providing adaptive flash (hybrid flash) arrays, and since then, they have released all flash storage solutions as well. Now, Nimble has structured these solutions to operate as a Unified Flash Fabric. Storage administrators can deploy any combination of all flash and adaptive flash solutions in their data center and manage them as a single array.
The Nimble Timeless Storage Guarantee has a few features that include flat support pricing, free controller upgrades after three years, and all-inclusive software offers. The goal of this program is to make owning a Nimble Storage array as hassle-free as possible.
Nimble Storage All Flash
All flash storage is making waves in the industry. Every major storage manufacturer, from EMC to Pure, now offers an all flash solution. Thanks to data compression, data deduplication, and other strategies, these developers have been able to drive down the price of flash to competitive levels. Storage companies have been looking forward to this for years, and flash can now compete with spinning disk.
Nimble is innovating for this new generation of storage developers.
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About Mindsight
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