The HPE Nimble storage system provides the University with its Type 2 "bulk" storage. This system contains many of the advanced features of our performance storage but at a lower cost.

Data Reduction

To help reduce the physical disk space required to store data features such as Thin provisioning, Compression and Deduplication are used to optimise the date before it is written to disk.

Depending on the type of data this can produce space savings in excess of 200%. Helping to cut back the amount of cost, power and cooling required to provide larger amounts of physical disk.

Hybrid Storage

Although the current Nimble solution stores data on slower disk then our Type 1 performance storage it also adds an amount of faster flash disk to provide a hybrid solution that can cache and speed up access to frequently read data.

Mirrored Data

As used with our Type 1 performance storage, the Nimble arrays now provide mirrored data to our bulk storage service.

This allows services hosted on these arrays to remain available should we need to power down a data centre or array for maintenance as well as quick recovery from disasters affecting a single data centre.