Here’s a recent rollup of all things Nimble Storage that you may have missed – including new software, new integration / partnerships, and our true multi-cloud technology (HPE Cloud Volumes) is now available for the UK and Ireland!
Happy reading…
NimbleOS 5.1.1.0 Achieves IPR from Support (Initial Production Release)
This month we’ve seen the hotly anticipated NimbleOS 5.1 achieve ‘IPR’ status, which is the first release available for production use in customer environments. 5.1 has been part of a successful closed beta program for 6 months and it’s exciting to see this code now on the path to General Availability (where we underwrite 99.9999% availability).
This release includes the much demanded Nimble Peer Persistence feature (synchronous replication with app-transparent failover). It also includes iSCSI & FC multi-protocol support, a revamped vSphere HTML5 plugin, and some considerableXCOPY performance enhancements to support deduplication. We’ve also enhanced our Folder technology, as well as space reporting features within the Nimble UI.
There are also new things in the code that will enable some new products and services due for launch this Summer on the Nimble platform – including Storage Class Memory in our Gen5 AFAs.
Join our Live Webinar on April 30th at 10am where we’re walking through the new release, as well as the new features. Please do register for the if you’re interested to hear, we’ll also be showing a live demo. Register now.
NimbleOS 5.1 Technical Blogs
Release notes
Demo: Redesigned HTML5 VMware Plugin
NimbleOS 5.0.7.x Released From Support
NimbleOS 5.0.7.x was released as a maintenance release from Support in February. The main feature in this update will allow for the newer 4u ‘ES2’ capacity expansion shelves to attach to the 3u CS235/CS300/CS500/CS700 systems, alongside various bugfixes.
As always, please check the Infosight whitelist/blacklist to see if you’re certified to upgrade to this release should you wish to apply it. You may also receive an alert from Infosight recommending to upgrade to this release based on known bugs you could be susceptible to.
HPE Cloud Volumes – UK & Ireland Regions Ready for Use!
HPE Cloud Volumes is an enterprise grade storage service which allows consumers of Public Cloud (AWS & Azure) to run mission critical applications with the same Nimble goodness of resiliency, durability and enterprise software features as you experience On Premises but across multiple public clouds.
All Nimble systems running NimbleOS 5 also allow for data mobility TO and FROM HPE Cloud volumes without any ingress or egress charges, and this is all backed up by HPE Nimble Support and HPE Infosight.
Cloud Volumes will be live in the London region (eu-west-2) in May, and in the Dublin region (eu-west-1) in June. We have been live in the US in Virginia (us-east-1) and Oregon (us-west-2) since 2017. *We are able to accept beta testing as of this week!*
If Public Cloud and lifting/shifting enterprise workloads is top of your mind, we’d be delighted to offer complimentary Proof of Concepts and Trials for Nimble customers. Click here to let me know if you’ll be interested in a PoC.
Furthermore, we are running a promotion during launch: Free 5TiB of Cloud Volumes replication store for 90 days for Nimble customers who have purchased a Nimble array between February and July 2019. Please email me and let me know if you’re interested to discuss more.
We have a new Cloud Volumes calculator available in Infosight for you to model costs based on your per-volume consumption.Check it out!
Other Resources:
HPE Cloud Volumes website
Watch: Live Cloud Volumes Webinar On-Demand
Datasheet
Cloud Volumes TCO Calculator vs AWS & Azure
Demo: Creating Cloud Volumes to attach to AWS & Azure
Demo: Enterprise Cloud Storage for Containers
Demo: Cloud On-Ramp using HPE Nimble Storage
Demo: Use VMware VVols for Workloads On-Prem & Public Cloud
Lightboard: Introduction to HPE Cloud Volumes
Lightboard: Backup to Cloud with HPE Cloud Volumes
Lightboard: Data Mobility in the Cloud
Nimble & Google Cloud Partnership / Reference Design
This month HPE Nimble Storage also announced a partnership & reference architecture for Google Cloud, and specifically the Anthos hybrid-cloud technology, powering both Google Cloud and GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). The reference architecture is using Proliant servers & Nimble Storage on-premises, and expect to see HPE Cloud Volumes become a part of the Google Public Cloud offering in the future.
It allows for:
- Scale compute and storage independently.
- Run public cloud environments on enterprise class private cloud infrastructure
- Uniform management between public and private cloud
- 99.9999% availability for virtualised and containerised workloads.
Whilst it’s early days for the partnership and integration it’s truly exciting to see this work – considering that by 2022 it’s believed by analysts that over 75% of all organisations will have deployed containerised workloads… and it’s looking like GKE is leading the Enterprise usage race at this time.
Blog announcement
Main website
New Software Available – Recovery Manager Central 6 (RMC)
Recovery Manager Central is a complimentary tool available to storage customers, and seamlessly integrates HPE Nimble Storage & 3PAR with HPE StoreOnce Systems, leveraging Nimble’s snapshot efficiency & performance with storage-integrated backups to deliver flash accelerated application protection and copy data management with less cost and complexity.
RMC is also built for cloud, allowing you to leverage public cloud through HPE CloudBank Storage for cost-effective long term retention of your backups.
RMC 6 introduced support for HPE Nimble Storage arrays, a new unified copy policy construct to centrally manage frequency and retention of all copies taken by RMC, a completely re-vamped GUI for improved usability, and other enhancements to each application plug-ins.
In the future there will be even more Nimble based integration for application-integrated backups and restores of SQL, Oracle, Exchange, VMware and more – all without any additional licensing and using native Nimble snapshots.
Also expect a new release of RMC soon that will support replication and copying data between Nimble and 3PAR arrays…
RMC 6.0 requires NimbleOS 5.0.5.0 and above.
Documentation & Software Download (on Infosight)
Blog post
Infosight Cross-Stack AI Recommendations Now Live
We announced a new ground-breaking Infosight feature at HPE Discover at the backend of 2018 which takes the Infosight Machine Learning to the next stage, and to start looking at Cross-Stack Recommendations using the collected VMware cross-stack analytics we provide. This takes Infosight into a new realm of doing AI across multiple infrastructure stacks – moving towards our vision of AI across the Datacentre.
This feature has now gone live, and can be found under the Labs area of Infosight (direct link here). This is a useful tool, as it starts to open recommendations for administrators to tune the VMware environment based on potential observations – for example, CPU Ready or Memory Ballooning in an ESX server, or possibly a rogue VM causing problems with IO within a datastore with other VMs/
Here’s an Introduction Blog to the feature, and here’s a demo on YouTube.
(Hyper-V users, your voices have been heard –Hyper-V Cross-Stack analytics is something we’re actively working on in Engineering now – but no guarantees on release timeframes at this time).
Infosight Welcome Center Now Live
Nimble Storage has always had a maniacal focus on being the most easy to consume enterprise storage platform in the industry – and to continue on that path, we’ve now released the Infosight Welcome Center; a space where new Nimble customers can interactively plan, design & deploy Nimble systems, all with videos from unboxing through to initial setup.
This is the first step in our vision of moving towards the ability to deploy Nimble directly through Infosight (such like an Aruba switch) – very exciting stuff.
We’d love your feedback on the new Welcome Center. What are we missing? What do you like? What don’t you like? If you have 5 minutes please go ahead and give feedback to Engineering.
New Software Available – Infosight App for iOS
This month we released our new Infosight mobile app, available for iOS from the Apple AppStore. In the first release it’s focusing on Nimble technologies.
It’s a useful tool, that allows for:
- Monitoring the health of Nimble systems
- An Exceptions dashboard
- Alerts & Notifications
- Create, monitor & update support cases
- Predictive Analytics on-the-go
- Knowledge Base articles
Check it out on the Apple AppStore here, and here’s the announcement blog.
Don’t fret Android users; Engineering are scoping an appropriate Android version as we speak, although there’s no timeline for release just yet.
Have feedback about the app? Then click here and tell us what you’d like to see next!
Nimble Goes Composable – Now Integrated in HPE OneView 4.2
Being part of a wider portfolio engineering company allows for Nimble technology to become deeply integrated into different platforms within said portfolio. One such advancement is integrating into the HPE OneView tool for “Composable Infrastructure” alongside the HPE Synergy platform.
This feature enables admins to provision Nimble volumes natively via OneView server profiles, server profile templates, volume templates & standalone volumes in a single management tool.
Today, it’s only for Nimble iSCSI volumes. Expect Fibre Channel support as well as “FlatSAN” support later this year. It requires NimbleOS 4.5 and above – including NimbleOS 5.x.
Blog – What’s New in OneView 4.2
Video: What is Composable Infrastructure
OneView Release Notes
OneView Support Matrix
HPE Intelligent Storage Webinar Series
It’s worth plugging that we run a regular webinar series every other Tuesday at 10am GMT – these are 45-50 minute technical sessions and updates for various products and/or solutions within HPE Storage and the wider ecosystem.
Recent sessions include our announcements from HPE Discover, an overview of our Primary & Secondary Storage solutions, and a recap of HPE Infosight with the new additions of 3PAR and HPE ProLiant servers, as well as other sessions such as our Cohesity OEM relationship and more.
You can view previous recordings, as well as sign up to our next sessions here.
Nimble Storage Hands-On Training Classes
A staple of Nimble Storage in the UK has been the regular hands-on training classes, designed to get end-users up to speed with the technology, hands on administration and how to use some of the features such as snapshots, clones and replication. This is a 1-day class held around the UK – and is now called “Introduction to HPE Nimble Storage – H6LH8S”.
I’m pleased to say we still continue to run the 1-day course today, and if you or your colleagues ever wish to attend a course, you can do so:
Course Description
Register for course
We’re adding new dates all the time, so if you don’t see one in the location or time then please let me know.
If you’ve already attended the 1-day class and would like deeper knowledge on subjects such as VMware VVols, Microsoft, Linux, Veeam and other Nimble tools like scale-out, then we run a chargeable 2-day class that you can attend, which includes 70% lab time! This is called “Nimble Storage Administration & Integration – H6LH9S”. The 1-day course serves as a prerequisite to this course.
Course Description
Register for course
And Finally…. Richard “Moss” Ayoade on Intelligent Storage & Infosight
Keep your eyes open for a new social media campaign, where Richard Ayoade resurrects his “Moss” character from IT Crowd in order to wax lyrical on HPE Intelligent Storage, Infosight and Cloud Volumes ?.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
That’s it for this rollup! Be well, and stay Nimble 🙂