Microsoft’s Exchange 2010 Solution Reviewed Program (aka: ESRP) is often used as a good benchmark for storage platforms for a number of reasons.  First, and most importantly,  its unbiased: its Microsoft’s test and Microsoft audits and publishes the results.   This omits any spin different vendor’s marketing departments might apply to the results.  Secondly, its frankly a very good test of what a storage platform can do under load and how efficiently it deals with that load.

Dell’s EqualLogic has for a long time posted numbers that put most others to shame, both in the shear number of mailboxes their PS Series could support, but more importantly, how many disks they required to do it.  Its one thing to say you can support 10,000 Exchange 2010 users, but the real number is how many disks it took you to accomplish the task as that shows how well the SAN uses the physical resources at its disposal (that you have spent good money on).

Well, Nimble Storage has finally gotten their results published and they are simply staggering, besting EqualLogic by a big margin.  They supported 20,000 mailbox users using just one 3U array which only 12 spinning disks (and SATA disks to boot!) .  To those unfamiliar with Nimble that may sound like witchcraft….to those that understand their unique CASL architecture its entirely expected.

Below is a chart on how some of the major players fared.

So, how do they do it?   MAGIC!  No, just kidding…very, very good engineering.  Their CASL architecture combines SSD-as-cache (not a tier), inline compression, variable block sizes and large sequential writes in a way that allows their arrays to put up very high IOPs numbers while also allowing for extreme efficiency in storage utilization.  Put another way: dollar for dollar, no one else is can store more per array while also pushing anywhere near as many IOPs.  It is truly a game-changer.

Check out our Nimble Mini-Site for more info and Contact Us to discuss further and schedule a demo

Source: Microsoft’s ESRP: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/ff182054

The recent flooding in Thailand has caused a world-wide shortage of hard drives that is not expected to clear up anytime soon and customers are feeling the pinch.  Almost all SAN storage vendors have been affected and the results have been predictable: rising prices and extended lead times….Notice I said “almost all” SAN storage vendors…

Nimble Storage’s unique architecture has actually helped them during this shortage: because they use SSDs as system cache (not a tier), they require far fewer hard drives (and SATA drives at that) to attain lofty IOPs numbers.  What would take a traditional SAN vendor 90 x 15k rpm SAS drives to accomplish (~15k IOPs), Nimble can easily do with 12 SATA drives and that is paying off in a big way for them and their customers.

Nimble had been consistently winning business on their own merits even before the drive shortage, but when other vendors are quoting 40-60 day lead times and Nimble can ship their iSCSI arrays in just a few days, that only helps their case.

More Info at Our Nimble Mini-Site