Nimble Storage, gaining traction in the new-gen storage sector with its NAND flash-optimized hybrid storageware, came out April 17 with a new, validated reference architecture for private cloud deployments running Windows Server and System Center on Cisco Systems’ UCS.
Nimble’s Storage SmartStack has been validated to support as many as 75 virtual machines inside the Microsoft Fast Track environment. The reference architecture consists of a three-rack-unit Nimble Storage CS200 Series, the Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) C-Series rack-mount server platform, Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V and System Center 2012.
Microsoft’s Fast Track is a reference architecture for building private clouds. It combines Microsoft software, guidance and validated configurations with computing, network and storage architecture partners. It utilizes the core capabilities of the Windows Server 2012 operating system and the Hyper-V hypervisor to provide the building blocks of a private cloud infrastructure.
The CS-Series enables consolidation of storage for multiple applications virtualized by Hyper-V on a single 3U array. Microsoft claims that this reduces power, cooling and space by as much as 75 percent compared with many legacy storage platforms.
Nimble Storage’s scale-to-fit approach scales to the Windows Server with Hyper-V and Cisco UCS platforms, allowing nondisruptive and independent scaling of performance and capacity, the company said. Integrated data protection features of the Cisco servers plug into the high-availability and live-migration features of Windows Server’s Failover Clustering capabilities to provide high system availability.
With its NAND flash products, Nimble competes with Violin Memory, Pure Storage, Astute, Nimbus, Whiptail, and divisions of NetApp, Toshiba, IBM, EMC, Dell and Oracle.
The new reference architectures are available now. For more information, go here.