Had a wonderful visit with the folks from Nimble while attending Storage Field Day last month. I’ve long been interested in Nimble as a storage platform, and had my sights set on finding out what the secret sauce was in the mix. To be sure, my personal perspective was a little biased, as in full disclosure, OnX Enterprise Solutions, my employer, is a very aligned partner with HPE, who’d just recently announced their intention to purchase Nimble. Now, the deal has yet to be finalized, I hear though, that this will be completed, maybe within the next couple weeks, as of this writing.

The technology these fine folks presented to us was quite interesting. With an eye toward cloud as a component of primary, management, updates, and analytics being delivered via a very seamless cloud interface. There’s also an emphasis on their “Cloud Volumes” project, which I’d be happy to delve into, but my friend Dan Frith ( @PenguinPunk ) has done far better on his posting here: https://www.penguinpunk.net/blog/nimble-storage-gets-cloudy/

We learned how a heatmap of data transfer on a timeline scale was a key metric to determine any bottlenecks in the troubleshooting process. Once can easily establish what processes are running during hot periods, and therefore determine what timelines can be modified in an effort to remediate these hot zones. Quite helpful from a troubleshooting perspective.

While in the presentation, as we learned about the analytics engine of InfoSight, a pal from Twitter, Dimitris Krekoukias ( @DiKrek ) reached out to me to let me know that what we were seeing there was just the tip of the iceberg on InfoSight. Since OnX plans to promote the product, I asked Dimitris to come into our Lisle, Illinois offices and give us the full download on where InfoSight was from this viewpoint.

Well, color me duly impressed. Not only does the interface collect information from many different aspects of the environment, including, but not at all limited to storage, but it sends that information to a secure and sanitized collective database. This information ensures that potential gotchas are caught and cross referenced against other environments wherein the potential threats to the stability of your environment can be remediated in a predictive analytics perspective.

If your VMware environment is, for example, in need of a patch or should that patch should be avoided so as to avoid downages, you’ll receive this information via secure Nimble messaging. Again, this information could be related to connectivity, compute, storage, virtual environment, and even in some cases applications. This, to me, is truly stepping outside the bounds of the limited side of storage, to ensure uptime approaching the desired goals of X#9’s.

Many companies seem to have adopted the concept of predictive analytics, but for my money, nobody has compared to the idea promoted by InfoSight and Nimble. I feel that the analytics software where in Nimble is as compelling as anything else in its portfolio, and quite possibly moreso.