News

Multicloud Storage Service Spans AWS, Microsoft Azure

• By David Ramel
• 02/27/2017

Nimble Storage Inc. today introduced a beta offering that it claims provides the only enterprise-grade multicloud block storage service for the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds.

Called Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV), the product's enterprise-grade availability and data services can help organizations move new types of enterprise apps to the cloud, the San Jose, Calif., company said.

Nimble Storage sees the first wave of cloud apps as being mostly content-centric native Web and mobile apps, lacking enterprise-friendly features such as data durability, data services such as snapshots and the ability for multiple hosts to share the same volumes.

The next wave of cloud applications comprises traditional transactional-centric workloads -- like transactional databases -- moving to the public cloud space, with stringent storage requirements.

NCV flash-based storage can provide the enterprise functionality to open up that new frontier, the company said, while providing other benefits such as the avoidance of cloud vendor lock in along with better data reliability and uninterrupted data access.

"In the simplest terms, the NCV service delivers flash storage volumes (block storage) to AWS EC2 instances or Azure Virtual machines," exec Ajay Singh said in a blog post today. "And, it offers some very significant benefits compared to native cloud block storage services like Amazon EBS or Azure Disk Volumes."

The new NCV service is designed to provide the following three primary benefits highlighted by the company:

• Easy data mobility between public clouds and on-premises datacenters without large data egress charges.
• Global visibility and predictive analytics, opening up information such as usage, history, trends and costs spanning public clouds and on-premises datacenters. This can reportedly help organizations optimize resource utilization and avoid end-of-month cloud billing surprises.
• The combination of enterprise-grade reliability and features with the simplicity of native cloud storage.

"In this era of Uber, Lyft and Airbnb, complete transparency is table stakes for any cloud service," Singh said. "You should have full visibility into what you're going to rent, how well it's going to work, and exactly how much it's going to cost you. And once you are using it, you should have visibility into usage, history, trends, and be able to easily uncover opportunities for optimization and cost savings. NCV does all of the above -- without any additional monitoring tools, scripts or third-party software. And if you also happen to own Nimble technology in your datacenter, it gives you global visibility across all of your assets, on-premise and in the cloud."

Some 50 companies from a range of industries are participating in the beta program for NCV, which offers two levels of service starting at $0.10/GB/month, in addition to AWS and Microsoft Azure charges.