Edinburgh-based business solutions provider Hutchinson Networks today announced that it has become the first Scottish-based company to become an authorised Nimble Storage Service Provider Partner. With this significant technical accreditation, Hutchinson Networks joins an elite group of UK Nimble Storage Service Provider partners.

Nimble Storage is the leader in predictive flash storage, enabling customers to experience absolute performance, nonstop availability and cloud-like agility that accelerate critical business processes. The Nimble Storage Predictive Flash platform offers All Flash arrays and a series of Adaptive Flash arrays – all of which are supported by InfoSight Predictive Analytics.

As well as providing Nimble Storage hardware to its customers, Hutchinson Networks selected Nimble Storage to form the storage element of its Fabrix cloud platform. Nimble provides hybrid storage arrays that combine the performance of SSD (solid state disks, AKA flash) with cost effective traditional disks. CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout) is used to identify active or hot data, which is stored on flash, while other data is written to disk. Reads and writes to flash are carried out by the CPU, which is dramatically quicker (x100) than traditional spindle disks. This means that a significantly higher number IOPS (Input Output Operations) can be achieved on Nimble Storage than has previously been possible. As a result, the IOPS on the array can be scaled without having to add additional disk drives, making it perfect for a scalable cloud platform such as Fabrix.

Hutchinson Networks’ CTO Stephen Hampton commented, “We’re delighted to have joined Nimble Storage as their first Scottish service provider partner. Nimble Storage was an easy decision for Fabrix – they have an innovative technology, which meets all of our needs – and it provides significant cost savings that our customers can directly benefit from”.

“Our relationship with Nimble Storage also enables us to provide important additional services to our customers, such as Disaster Recovery as a Service and Back-up and Recovery”.