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Explainer Nimbles Cloud Volumes (NCV) store block data for use by Amazon or Azure compute instances, but the NCVs themselves are not stored in either Amazons Elastic Block Store or in the Azure cloud.

With remarkable timing Nimble made these claims just hours before the S3 outages, which had knock-on effects for EBS and other services the storage contender claimed the two cloud giants' infrastructure does not have the availability or reliability needed. Nimble staffer Dimitris Krekoukias quoted Amazon EBS documentation as an example to justify this stance:

He claimed: Every single customer Ive spoken to that has been looking at AWS had never read that link I posted in the beginning, and even if they had they glossed over the reliability part.

Krekoukias, blogging as RecoveryMonkey, claimed the following about ABS and Azure block storage:

Nimble says its data centre transactional applications, which use block storage, are inhibited from moving to cloud it can't guarantee, saying Nimble has built its own cloud to deliver the Nimble Cloud Volumes service.

Customers can choose a capacity, performance and backup SLA, and attach to either AWS and/or Azure. And "The users never see or touch a Nimble system in any way. All they see is [our] easy portal."

There are six "nines" storage uptime and data integrity is millions of times more than what native cloud block storage provides. Really?

In a separate blog Krekoukias writes: Nimble creates a checksum and a self-ID for each piece of data. The checksum protects against data corruption. The self-ID protects against lost/misplaced writes and misdirected reads

He says that, as well as block-level checksums, the Nimble storage does multi-level checksums:

Add this to the triple+ parity RAID scheme Nimble uses and Krekoukias thinks he is justified in saying NCVs are more than a million times more durable than EBS or Azure block storage.

He says that, with database IOs prioritised over low-latency sequential IOs, Nimble offers an IOPS SLA with its Cloud Volumes.

Krekoukias said Nimble is "still working on pricing but the monthly commitment is $1,500. The minimum customer commitment is 1 month. The minimum volume commitment is 1 day."

"So, a customer that's already paying $1,500 could create a huge volume temporarily to test something and then delete it in a few hours. We will only charge them for that day of use."

The Register has contacted Amazon for comment about the claims.

Nimble has built a public block storage cloud service, which means quite some investment in facilities and software. Obviously it thought this was the best, if not the only, way to get on-premises transactional block data availability and durability levels up to mission-critical type levels. That way it can continue to sell its storage facilities, on a cloud usage basis and integrate with its on-premises gear in a hybrid cloud model.

Of course its users are locked in to NCVs but, with NCV availability and durability being, as far as we know, unique in the public cloud arena that will be a trade-off its customers are willing to make.

There are alternative public clouds for backup data, like those from Backblaze and Carbonite, but block storage is quite another matter.

This Nimble public cloud block storage is certainly an individual marketing tactic and we wonder if other on-premises storage array suppliers will do the same thing. Wed point out that, as far as we know, no other stand-alone storage supplier is doing this. There are IBM and Oracle with their public clouds but these are system-level offerings. Dell (EMC), HDS, HPE and NetApp are not doing what Nimble has settled on.

It is, literally, a nimble offering. Were surprised, and say its great to see a small player shake up the cloud block storage market. Lets hope it builds up a sufficient customer base for it to withstand whatever pricing hammer blows Amazon might send its way in the future.

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Nimble: Just as well our cloud storage runs in our own cloud, eh , eh? - The Register