Nimble launched the CS210, a year after it came out of stealth with CS220 and CS240 systems that combine iSCSI, integrated inline compression and replication to optimize and protect data, and flash to accelerate performance. The startup also said Artis Capital Management has led its fourth funding round, bringing its total funding to $58 million.

The CS210 is an entry level version of the Nimble platform. The CS210 has 8 TB of usable capacity, and costs $38,000. Comparatively, the CS220 has 16 usable TB for about $58,000 and the CS240 holds 32 TB for about $88,000.

Besides capacity, the difference with the CS210 is that it doesn’t support 10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) out of the gate. The CS210 comes with four GbE ports, while the CS220 and CS240 have either six GbE or two 10 GbE ports. All the systems use 1 TB or 2 TB 7200 RPM SATA drives with up to 1 TB of multi-level cell (MLC) flash in 100 GB drives. The systems cache copies of hot data blocks in flash and send it off to the SATA disk.

Nimble marketing VP Dan Leary said the vendor has more than 100 customers in three full quarters of shipping systems. He said most customers use it for primary applications such as VMware and Microsoft Exchange and SQL while larger companies use it for test/dev and other specific applications.
Leary said he expects the CS210 to appeal to organizations “a little bigger than the classic SMB. We see it fitting at the low end of the mid-market for companies that want a primary system or a remote/branch office of a company that might have a CS220 or CS240 already. It’s also a good fit for customers replicating to a DR facility who have 90 days of snapshots at their main site but can get away with only 30 days in the DR site.”

Nimble’s latest funding closely follows the $16 million round it announced last December. Leary said the startup hasn’t burned through that previous funding haul, but benefitted from an attractive valuation from new investor Artis Capital Management. Artis was a major shareholder in Data Domain before EMC acquired the deduplication backup specialist.

Leary said Nimble will use the funding to expand sales to Europe and Asia. The company has 80 employees today and no sales team outside of North America.

Nimble switched CEOs in March, hiring former NetApp executive and Omneon CEO Suresh Vasudevan to replace founder Varun Mehta, who remains with Nimble as VP of Engineering and sits on the board.

High end storage systems are back in style, at least according to the latest storage revenue numbers from IDC.

IDC’s worldwide quarterly disk storage tracker research shows that storage systems with an average selling price of $250,000 and above rallied in 2010, finishing the year with 30.2% market share. That, according to senior research analyst Amita Potnis, brings the high-end back to its 2008 pre-financial crisis level.

“There were multiple drivers beyond the remarkable growth in high-end systems, including demand for storage consolidation and datacenter upgrades supported by new product push from a number of vendors,” Pontis said in the IDC release.

Hitachi Data Systems had the most significant high-end product release of 2010 with its Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). HDS revenues jumped nearly 30% in the fourth quarter over 2009 after the VSP release.

Other than the rise of the high end, the fourth quarter of 2010 looked a lot like the rest of the year for storage sales. Ethernet storage – in the form of NAS and iSCSI – continued to outpace the market by a wide margin, as did vendors NetApp and EMC.

For the fourth quarter, IDC put external storage system revenue at over $6 billion for an increase of 16.2% over 2009. The NAS market grew 41.3% with EMC owning 52.8% of the market and NetApp 23.7%. The iSCSI SAN market grew 42.1% in the quarter, led by Dell with 32.6% and HP with 14.7%.

NetApp overall revenue grew 43.7% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, and it increased market share from 8.4% in 2009 to 10.3%. EMC remained the overall leader with 26% share, followed by IBM at 16.3% and HP at 11.6%. HDS (8.7%) and Dell (7.9%) round out the top six behind NetApp. HDS (29.7% growth), EMC (26.3%) and NetApp outpaced the overall market gain. IBM, HP and Dell lost market share in the quarter.

For the entire year, IDC put external storage revenue at $21.2 billion for an 18.3% increase over 2009. EMC led the way with 25.6% market share, followed by IBM at 13.8%, NetApp and HP with 11.1% each, and Dell with 9.1%. Only EMC and NetApp gained market share for 2010 among the top five. 

But Frank Slootman, president of EMC’s data backup and recovery division and Data Domain’s CEO until EMC acquired the company last year, says there is no dedupe in Nimble’s storage. Slootman saw my story on SearchStorage about Nimble, and sent an email claiming “there is no dedupe in

Nimble whatsoever. Read their white paper, or just ask them. We did. They do have local compression.”

I did ask Nimble CEO Varun Mehta when I spoke to him before their launch. He said his storage systems use inline compression for primary data and dedupe for backups. And according to Nimble’s press release on its product launch (emphasis added):

The CS-Series is based on the company’s patent-pending architecture, Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL™), which enables fast inline data compression, intelligent data optimization leveraging flash memory and high-capacity disk, instant deduped backups, and WAN efficient replication – all in a single device. CASL allows organizations to reduce their capital expenditures for storage and backup by at least 60 percent, while eliminating the need for separate, disk-based backup.

And a data sheet on the Nimble web site states:

Nimble slashes IT costs by converging compressed primary storage, deduped backup storage, and disaster recovery into one solution.

Slootman is correct about the whitepaper, though. A paper called “A New Approach to Storage and Backup” on the Nimble site does not say it uses deduplication. It claims “Nimble Storage CASL provides in-line compression on all data” and in a section on its backup technology says “CASL enables instant, application-consistent backups on the same array with very efficient (up to 20x) backup capacity optimization.”

Capacity optimization could be dedupe or compression. But nowhere in the 15-page whitepaper does Nimble claim to dedupe backup data.

While Nimble execs said in press interviews that they dedupe, they had a different message at a blogger TechField Day in Seattle where the startup officially launched Thursday. Nimble presenters did not mention deduplication at the blogger event.

I asked Nimble for clarification about its mixed marketing, and its VP of marketing Dan Leary replied via email:

“Sorry if there was any confusion regarding deduplication. Nimble does not deduplicate in the Data Domain sense, where all duplicate blocks are eliminated using a content-based signature. Our snapshot-based block sharing eliminates duplicate blocks across backups like deduplication systems. Nimble compresses, but does not deduplicate, within a primary storage volume. However, we offer better space savings compared with any secondary storage. Secondary storage systems require a baseline copy of the original data to get started. Because converged storage doesn’t require a baseline full backup, Nimble provides even better capacity optimization than secondary storage. Look for an upcoming blog from our CTO who will cover this topic in more detail.”

If Nimble can shrink data enough to make backups and replication for DR more efficient without taking much of a performance while compressing, it may not make much of a difference how it’s doing it. Nimble beta tester Dave Conde, IT director of eMeter, says he’s found performance outstanding and he’s getting a reduction in data although he hasn’t measured the actual rate.

But if Nimble is deduping, EMC execs probably want to know just how close the startup’s dedupe technology is to the dedupe it paid $2.1 billion for when it acquired Data Domain.

In a follow-up email, Slootman attributed Nimble’s mixed message to “a disconnect with marketing. They probably mean like NetApp that their snapshots use block differentials. They should not be using the term [deduplication] so indiscriminately.”

John Joseph, formerly VP of marketing for the iSCSI SAN vendor, has been shifted to a new position as Vice President of Enterprise Solutions Marketing. A Dell spokesperson described the shift in an email to SearchStorage:

John has taken on a new role within Dell focused on integrating solutions. This move comes on the heels of Dell’s recent announcement that it will organize itself around three major customer segments – large enterprise, public sector, and small and medium businesses. John’s move further demonstrates the success of the EqualLogic acquisition and its integration into Dell and the importance of storage in Dell’s enterprise business solutions.

Asked for clarification on what exactly “integration” means, the spokesperson offered further,

The role focuses on bringing our different products together (storage, servers, etc.) and making sure we addressing our customer’s data center needs. So yes, he will still have contact with all storage products as well as servers, services, and software. Customers want a ready tested and certified IT solution from Dell and we’re responding.

So Joseph will still have contact with the EqualLogic products, but it seems to have gotten more remote–or at least more mixed in with other duties. Duties, we might note, that seem a bit removed from his previous role in marketing for an iSCSI SAN platform that Dell positions for SMBs and the midrange. Presumably, enterprise solutions require some high-scale, Fibre Channel activities as well.

More importantly, Joseph was, as mentioned above, a public symbol for EqualLogic and is closely associated with that company and its products. His continued presence at the wheel following the acquisition was one of the more encouraging signs I saw for the Dell/EqualLogic integration.

The post gets into nitty-gritty details and even includes what look like scanned-in napkin drawings to illustrate some of the complexities of performance management using ESX 3.x server with iSCSI. There are multiple links to futher resources on everything from the fundamentals of link aggregation to the full iSCSI spec.

But the bottom line for storage users is that “the ESX 3.x software initiator only supports a single iSCSI session with a single TCP connection for each iSCSI target…So, no matter what MPIO setup you have in ESX, it doesn’t matter how many paths show up in the storage multipathing GUI for multipathing to a single iSCSI Target, because there’s only one iSCSI initiator port.”

There are ways around it–in short, the post states, “Use the ESX iSCSI software initiator. Use multiple iSCSI targets. Use MPIO at the ESX layer. Add Ethernet links and iSCSI targets to increase overall throughput. Ser your expectation for no more than ~160MBps for a single iSCSI target.”

There’s also a workaround for single LUNs needing more than 160 MBps, using an iSCSI initiator in the guest along with MPIO, though the post acknowledges, “It has a big downside…you need to manually configure the storage inside each guest, which doesn’t scale particularly well from a configuration standpoint – so for most customers [say] they stick with the ‘keep it simple’ method.”

The best news out of this post for VMware and iSCSI users, though, is probably the pre-announcement that this behavior will be changing in future ESX releases.