American vendor Nimble Storage has added optional Fibre Channel connectivity to all of its hybrid storage arrays.

The move is unusual for a company which had specialized in iSCSI, a more recent IP-based Storage Area Network (SAN) protocol, ever since being established in 2008.

Radhika Bhasin, VP of Products and Alliances at Nimble Storage, told DatacenterDynamics that the company doesn’t believe in clear benefits of Fibre Channel over iSCSI. However, additional connectivity options have been requested by customers and will effectively quadruple the size of addressable market.

Nimble has also raised capacity limits for its storage systems – individual clusters can now include up to 160TB of flash memory, and arrays can now scale non-disruptively all the way to 1.6PB.

Rich in fiber
Nimble makes hybrid scale-out storage solutions that are both flexible and affordable. They are based on its Adaptive Flash platform, which features Nimble’s cache accelerated sequential layout (CASL) architecture and InfoSight, the company’s automated cloud-based management and support system.

“We have a single architecture where you can consolidate multiple workloads without having to worry about optimizing for any one particular dimension,” explained Bhasin.

She added that many customers have been asking whether they can deploy the CS Series arrays on Fibre Channel, either because they have expertise in-house, or they have already laid out the cables. The major difference between Fibre Channel and iSCSI is the former requires special-purpose cabling, while the latter relies on existing network infrastructure.

Before going to market, Nimble tested Fibre Channel connectivity on more than 40 customers, most of whom eventually purchased the arrays to integrate in their production environments.

The company says testers reported high levels of satisfaction with the ease of deployment and ability to consolidate a broad range of enterprise workloads within a single platform.

“Not only did Nimble deliver the additional performance demanded by our VM environment, we were able to set it up in a third of the time we spent setting up our current storage,” said Jaime Huizar, senior systems architect at Power Integrations.

“We replaced half a rack of our previous storage with only 9U of Nimble,” added Jeremy Balter, senior system administrator at LANdesk. “Frankly, I’ve never seen any other vendor deliver the kind of performance that Nimble does with the same set of hardware.”