Nimble Storage announces SmartStack solution

SmartStack for ROBO Desktop Virtualisation helps businesses with remote or branch offices deliver better responsiveness to their smaller IT environments. Management complexities, the size of a data centre’s footprint, application performance and the potential hefty investment of a storage environment are common pain-points that need to be considered when it comes to managing the desktops of employees who work at remote or branch offices. Part of the SmartStack family, SmartStack for ROBO Desktop Virtualisation is a converged infrastructure solution based on Nimble Storage’s CS-Series arrays, the newly introduced Cisco UCS Mini, and VMware Horizon 6. The UCS Mini embeds the unified server and networking capabilities of the top-of-rack UCS Fabric Interconnect directly into the UCS Mini chassis, enabling the new SmartStack solution to deliver compute, storage and networking in a single, easy-to-manage, compact solution. By deploying an optimised desktop virtualisation solution on-site at remote or branch offices rather than a central data center, IT organisations can deliver a predictable end-user experience by eliminating network dependent performance issues between sites.

Nimble’s SmartStack pre-validated reference architectures eliminate the challenges associated with deploying application, server, hypervisor, networking, and storage components. The new ROBO Desktop Virtualisation reference architecture is ideally suited for single site implementations with up to 500 seats and enables organisations to confidently deploy desktop virtualisation that is right-sized for their environment, with the ability to scale in alignment with changing requirements.

Nimble Storage’s CS-Series arrays are the building blocks of the company’s Adaptive Flash platform, which allocates storage resources to satisfy some of the industry's most pressing storage issues - including delivering better performance and capacity at a reasonable price, providing integrated protection with rapid backup and recovery and reining in storage complexity. The company's products are based on its patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) hybrid storage architecture that leverages fast read performance of flash and the cost-effective capacity of hard disk drives. Nimble combines this flash-optimised architecture with Nimble InfoSight, a cloud based management service that delivers predictive support and operational simplicity through deep data analytics.

SmartStack for ROBO Desktop Virtualisation offering has been validated by VMware Proven Storage Program. This programme validates specific criteria of workload performance for Horizon (with View) deployments.