Nimble Storage is evidently receiving orders from a broader spectrum of organizations. One of its customers is  Florida Blood Services, a not-for-profit blood bank that assists patients in critical care.

The company said that FBS replaced twelve of its old boxes for backup and recovery with only four Nimble CS240 converged storage arrays. Two of them are located at its St. Petersburg headquarters powering 160 VMs connected to 40 offices throughout Florida and Georgia, and another couple designated for disaster recovery can be found at Florida Blood Services’ Lakeland center.

In addition to shrinking down the overall deployment, Nimble also took credit for a resulting performance improvement. With the legacy system Blood Servers’ IT department could only back up 13 virtual machines per night, a timeframe that has now been reduced to a few seconds according to a release. Snapshot capacity has also received a boost.

“Across all of our volumes, we have thousands and thousands of snapshots on the system, and we’ve seen no degradation in performance. We’ve been so happy with the Nimble snapshotting system that we are pushing for a system-wide 15-minute backup frequency,” said Calvin Levy, a senior systems engineer working for Florida Blood Services in a statement.

The storage industry has had its fair share of updates lately. Permabit, the company that offers the fastest dedupe software currently available on the market, announced the latest member of its ecosystem yesterday. Stonefly has become an OEM of Albireo.

Also yesterday, EMC had some big data related news. It has integrated technology from Isilon with a Hadoop distribution that it developed in-house, thus offering a combination that’s both homegrown and has the potential of attract a lot of companies running large-scale and critical analytics jobs.