Balancing different workloads’ capacity requirements is about to become much easier for Nimble Storage Inc. customers. The flash array maker today introduced a set of “app-centric” management features that promise to help avoid situations where a virtual machine eats up too many resources and compromises the performance of its neighbors.

Such incidents tend to occur when an application experience a sudden spike in usage or, less commonly, suffers from some sort of technical issue that causes it to overprovision storage capacity. Nimble’s update brings a new quality-of-service feature that enables administrators to better prepare for unforeseen utilization changes by putting a cap on the amount of hardware resources available to every workload. This way, they can ensure that important applications have enough capacity even if lower priority services suddenly start acting up.

But in case storage allocations are somehow still exceeded due to some unexpected complication, administrators are able to use a new analytics feature added in conjunction to find the offending application. The value proposition that Nimble puts forth for the capability is fairly straightforward: The easier it is to identify the source of a utilization problem, the faster it can be solved. As a result, the end-users who rely on its hardware can resume their work faster.

The management features are joined by new support for Docker that is designed to accommodate the growing number of organizations building containerized applications. And last but not least, Nimble is also rolling out a new billing option called Storage on Demand that makes it possible to pay for its systems based on monthly capacity consumption. The pricing model is inspired by cloud providers like Amazon that only charge users for infrastructure they provision. It was first brought into the on-premise array market by an Irvine-based startup called Zadara Storage Inc. earlier this year.

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