Nimble Storage

Introduction

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- there are no LUNs in nimble, just volumes (volume and LUN is interchangeable)

- Nimble can only be used as LUNs; If you want to create  a CIFS share, you must

  create a LUN in Nimble and mount that to a host then do the sharing there

- it uses its SSDs to cache frequently used data

- has RAID 6 protection for dual-disk failures

- Adaptive Flash is utilizing SSDs instead of DRAM (DRAM is more expensive than

  SSDs) to cache frequently used data

- it uses thin provisioning

- it uses inline compression w/ no performance impact (compresses data as it is

  written to the storage array)

- It uses snapshots so that backup and restore time takes only seconds because

  backup is located within the array

Cabling

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Rules:

1. interface pair (e.g eth1 on controller A and eth2 on controller B) must be on

   the same switch and subnet (see sample topology below)

2. IP address are only assigned on the ports on controller A; controller B ports

   will automatically inherit those IP addresse during failover

3. the iSCSI discovery address must be the data IP

4. mgt IP and data IP must be on different subnet

5. data links are those interfaces w/ higher bandwith like tg1/2 (10 GBps) while

   mgt links are those with lower like eth1/2 (1 Gbps)

6. only 1 default gateway is needed which is for the MGT IP (Nimble OS 1.4)

Disks

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- if two disks are reconstructing simultaneously, failure of a third disk,

  though unlikely, could cause data loss

- you can view disk status by either going on the web gui or on cli

- on web gui, here are the disk states

Displaying

# list all disks together w/ their physical info like slot #, Serial #, Size, etc disk --list # displays detailed info on a particualr disk disk --info

Ways of Accessing Nimble Storage

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1. via ssh

2. via web url

Note: default credential is admin/admin