Nimble Storage Preps Multi-Cloud Storage Service for AWS, Microsoft Azure

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Nimble Storage on Monday launched a new enterprise-grade, multi-cloud storage service for running applications on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Nimble Cloud Volumes will provide enterprise-grade availability and data services that previously have not been readily available in block storage for the cloud, according to the company. These capabilities are needed for moving the next wave of applications to the cloud – traditional transactional workloads – which place stringent requirements on storage, it said.

Leonard Iventosch, Nimble Storage’s vice president of worldwide channels, tells Channel Partners that Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV) presents partners with a “tremendous opportunity to provide their customers with enterprise-grade storage that finally gives them the reliability, performance and flexibility they require to put critical enterprise applications in either AWS or Azure.”

“This allows partners to maintain not only their relevance, but to continue to be the trusted advisor to their customers,” he said. “Additionally, with Nimble Cloud Volumes, Nimble’s flash array offerings become more attractive for their customers, because Nimble arrays are future-proofed for the cloud. And, since Nimble Cloud Volumes eliminates vendor lock-in, it also offers partners an opportunity to sell migration services for customers moving data housed on-premise[s] to the cloud. Essentially, channel companies can set up a full cloud practice with migration services, public cloud managed services and on-premise[s] solutions that are cloud-ready. While maintaining account control, Nimble NCV also compensates partners to migrate their workloads to Azure or AWS through NCV.”{ad}

IT can use public cloud for compute and Nimble Cloud Volumes for storage capacity. Data protection is flexible and cost-effective, the company said, as customers only pay for changed data, not for additional full copies. IT also will be able to create instant zero-copy clones in the public cloud, allowing deployment of test and development, analytics and bursting.

Nimble Cloud Volumes also includes predictive-analytics capabilities, providing customers with visibility into their data across multiple clouds. Customers can pinpoint and resolve performance issues, and can obtain insights that can help to optimize storage costs and data placement.

“Previously, there was little incentive for resellers to incorporate cloud technology in their offerings, since it was difficult to integrate with existing on-premise[s] solutions,” Iventosch said. “Now, resellers don’t have to pick one or the other, and can continue to sell Nimble’s on-premises technology while also offering cloud solutions that can be easily added onto existing customer deployments, thanks to Nimble future-proofing its arrays for cloud.”

Nimble Cloud Volumes currently is in beta. There are 50 companies from a range of industries in the beta process, and more than 40 percent of them are Global 5000 enterprises. Customer preview will commence within the current fiscal quarter in the United States. Nimble Storage plans to make this service available to additional regions over the next six to 12 months.

“Cloud is a strategic priority in every organization today and IT teams are migrating their enterprise applications,” said Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft’s senior director of product marketing. “Nimble Cloud Volumes provide enterprise storage features and ease of migration to minimize disruption. Enterprises are able to move faster, achieve more and save money with the combination of Microsoft Azure and Nimble Cloud Volumes.”