Six months after word leaked that Nimble Storage Inc. is planning to follow in the footsteps of its top rivals from the hybrid array market and expand to the all-flash category, the news is now official. The vendor this morning pulled back the curtains on a new family of systems packed entirely with 3D NAND memory courtesy of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.

Customers have a choice of five different drives from the South Korean technology giant’s PM863 series, which includes fault-tolerance software that promises to prevent data loss in the event of a power failure or overheating. The most expensive configuration in the line crams four terabytes of raw capacity into a standard 2.5-inch enclosure that Samsung claims can last for as long as seven years before having to be replaced. According to Nimble, up to 48 units are able to fit in one of its new Predictive All Flash (AF) arrays thanks to a refreshed chassis design that is twice as dense as its existing hybrid systems.

As a result, a full-rack deployment is capable of storing over two petabytes of data with the help of the compression and deduplication features in Nimble’s software stack. The platform also provides customers with the ability to combine to four such shelves in a cluster that can be managed almost as if it were one big array. The vendor says that the functionality puts the scalability ceiling of its AF series above eight petabytes, which is an order of magnitude higher than the competition. Yet as impressive as the figure may be, that aren’t too many organizations that require – or, for that matter, could afford – so much solid-state memory.

Instead, the centralized management capabilities of Nimble’s software will likely find the most use in environments that combine its all-flash and hybrid systems. The company envisions customers running their databases, analytic applications and other performance-intensive workloads on the former while using its older arrays for more mundane work like delivering virtual desktop images. The CS-Series arrays can also be used for backup purposes so as to complement the AF family’s built-in data protection functionality.

A built-in implementation of the Triple Parity RAID algorithm enables a single array to withstand up to three drive failures before starting to lose records. Administrators don’t have to wait for that to happen, however, thanks to a hot-swapping mechanism that makes it possible to replace a faulty unit without having to take the system offline. That kills two birds with one stone, easing repairs while reducing downtime for end-users.

Image via Wikimedia