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.