Nimble Storage, a high profile hybrid array vendor, unveiled a converged infrastructure reference architecture at this week’s VMworld 2013 conference. Dubbed SmartStack for Business Critical Applications, the specification combines vSphere 5.1, Nimble’s CS-Series systems and Cisco UCS blade servers to “allow IT organizations to scale as needed to respond faster to changing business needs, while lowering project risks and capital expenses.”

The company argues that the architecture simplifies the configuration and management of business critical applications. SmartStack is validated to support 500-seat deployments of Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL Server, and enables users to scale compute and storage without investing in costly hardware upgrades.

“When managing business critical applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL server and SharePoint, to drive business operations, organizations are burdened with constant increases in cost and complexity,” said Radhika Krishnan, the vice president of product marketing and alliances at Nimble. “SmartStack for Business Critical Applications provides a truly modular approach, simplifying the management and deployment process of virtualized business applications. With this pre-validated architecture, organizations are better equipped to respond to changing business needs with the ability to scale as needs grow.”

Nimble had previously released SmartStack for Private Cloud with Cisco, a reference architecture for Microsoft Hyper-V that couples Cisco UCS fabric extenders and fabric interconnects with a 3U Nimble’s CS200 Series system. A deployment can support up to four UCS C220 M3 rack servers.

Nutanix, a rivaling provider of hybrid storage arrays, also made a splash at VMworld with the latest version of its converged infrastructure platform. Nutanix OS 3.5 features simplified VM monitoring, REST-based APIs for third party integration, and analytical functions that empower admins to draw insights from system health metrics. The new NOS release also introduces Elastic Deduplication Engine, a flash-aware dedupe tool.