Nimble Storage, a San Jose, Calif.-based flash hybrid storage specialist, took the wraps off a new, pre-validated converged infrastructure offering aimed at customers of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne business software during the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.
The product, dubbed SmartStack for Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, enables businesses that are running mid-sized deployments of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform to quickly upgrade to the latest version. Anchoring the application-optimized solution is Nimble’s new CS300 hybrid storage array.
The CS300, which the company released last month, ships with 640 GB of flash storage per array, a figure that can go up to 3,200 GB. The arrays leverage CPU-based storage management and optimization tech based on the company’s Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture and InfoSight automated cloud-based management software, for performance that rivals that all-flash arrays.
“We have developed a platform that adapts as customers consolidate multiple types of workloads with varying performance and capacity demands,” said Nimble’s Ajay Singh, vice president of product management. Enlisting Intel Sandy Bridge processors for Nimble’s “mainstream products expands our ability to address the needs of our customers,” he asserted.
Now, the CS300 is helping to provide an upgrade path for EnterpriseOne customers, with the help of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), specifically the computer networking giant’s new UCS Mini.
Not to be confused with Cisco’s UCS Express product, UCS Mini is aimed at edge-of-network applications. “Another way of describing the difference between UCS Express and UCS Mini would be the ability to run a small branch versus the ability to run an entire store with multiple applications running (for example), which you could do with UCS Mini,” Todd Brannon, Cisco UCS director of product management, told sister publication ServerWatch earlier this month.
Rounding out the Nimble’s latest SmartStack are Oracle VM, Oracle Linux, Oracle Database and version 9.1 of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. EnterpriseOne 9.1 templates for Oracle VM help streamline the deployment process.
Nimble’s flash-assisted storage architecture helps businesses meet two of the biggest challenges of “meeting the demands of business-critical applications the enterprise requires,” namely performance and availability, said Nimble’s Radhika Krishnan, vice president of product marketing and alliances, in a statement. “By leveraging our intelligent storage architecture, organizations are able to provide application-consistent performance and management, meet the increasing capacity demands of growing databases, while reducing costs.”