The future is flash-optimised hybrid storage

Q Can you provide some background on the company – when

formed, why, progress to date etc.?

A Nimble Storage first came to market in 2008 offering a hybrid storage model architected with both disk and flash storage. The company was founded on the belief that today’s applications demand an entirely new approach to storage. Essentially, we recognised early-on that organisations needed superior performance while being able to cater to capacity demands. Since then, Nimble has been extremely successful, growing exponentially.

Q Who are the key personnel involved?

A Each one of our employees has a crucial role to play in the success and continued growth of our company. We have a high bar on talent, but also an equally high bar on not hiring jerks. We have been able to grow our organisation without compromising on this principle.
Two of the most notable personnel are Co-Founders Varun Mehta, VP Engineering and Umesh Maheswari, CTO. Varun was the founding CEO in 2008, leading the company through its first three rounds of funding and a record rate of customer acquisitions. Umesh is responsible for defining Nimble Storage’s product architecture and developing core technologies.
Another person that’s been instrumental to our growth is Suresh Vasudevan, who has served as our CEO since 2011. Suresh spearheaded the company’s go-to-market plans, growing the company from 40 people when he joined to over 650 today. Suresh also led Nimble Storage’s IPO in December 2013, which was extremely successful.

Q What are the key company milestones to date?

A There have been a few milestones in the past six years, but there are three that are most notable. Firstly, in 2010 we delivered the first flash storage solution that delivers exceptionally low cost of performance and cost of capacity. Secondly, in 2013 we hit the 1,000 customer mark in less than two-and-a-half years of selling our products. Lastly, was when we went public late in 2013 and made a splash with our IPO debut.

Q In general terms, what are the USPs that Nimble brings to
the SSD/Flash market?

A There are five areas where we deliver substantial value relative to competitors, even when competitive products are configured to include flash SSDs and HDDs.
Firstly, we can accelerate customers’ applications by delivering 4-5 times better performance and 2-5 times more useable capacity on a per dollar basis than similarly priced systems. Our products require a fraction of the hardware resources needed compared to traditional enterprise storage designs, thus saving costs, space and electricity needed.
Secondly, we offer superior data protection through a combination of snapshots and WAN-optimised replication. This allows customers to protect more of their data and restore data much faster.
Thirdly, our products are unique in that our customers can scale both capacity and performance much more flexibly and independently and at the lowest incremental cost - all without disrupting applications.
Fourthly, our products are dramatically simpler to deploy and manage and most importantly to support on a day-to-day basis. Not only are they simple to setup and manage on a day-to-day basis, but they are much easier to integrate into a broader eco-system.
Finally, we have a unique approach to remote support automation that allows us to predict not just faults, but also sub-optimal conditions and proactively ensure that our customer systems are running in top co ndition at all times.

Q In more detail, what is Adaptive Flash?

A Adaptive Flash is the industry’s most advanced flash storage platform and represents the latest evolution in our radical re-engineering of storage infrastructure. Historically, IT had to choose between performance and capacity, forcing them to create independent storage silos that are inefficient, hard to scale, and difficult to manage. Adaptive Flash eliminates that trade-off, scaling performance and capacity as workloads require - all within a dramatically smaller footprint.
Adaptive Flash allows customers to intelligently scale and dynamically allocate storage resources within a storage system. It’s the foundation for our new products: the CS700, a high-end controller, CS700, which delivers as many as a half a million IOPS, and an all-flash shelf that allows customers to start small and non-disruptively scale to 64TB of flash within a single system. Nimble also offers the CS300 and the CS500 delivering Adaptive Flash benefits to the mid-range customer.
Q Can you give more details of the CASL Architecture that is a key
part of Nimble’s offering?

A CASL™ is Nimble’s patented Cache-Accelerated Sequential Layout architecture. It leverages flash as a read cache and features a unique data layout that maximises hard disk capacity without degrading performance. In essence, CASL scales performance and capacity seamlessly and independently. In order to do this, the CASL architecture leverages multi-core processors and a new data layout that converts random writes into sequential writes. This allows dense, low-cost 7200 RPM disks to consistently deliver high IOPS eliminating the need to depend on disk spindles for performance. CASL’s SSD read cache is also much more efficient and responsive than tiered flash.
CASL, along with InfoSight, Nimble’s automated cloud-based management and support system, form the foundation of Adaptive Flash platform.

Q You offer the SmartStack solutions – what are these?

A Nimble Storage’s SmartStack™ solutions are a collection of pre-validated reference architectures built on a rich partner ecosystem. These reference architectures are targeted at workloads such as VDI, business critical applications like Oracle and Microsoft Exchange, databases, as well as cloud deployments. Nimble collaborates with leading vendors like Microsoft, VMware, Cisco, Citrix, and CommVault to validate the SmartStack solution.

Q You also have the InfoSight monitoring engine – how does this
fit in to your technology/product portfolio?

A InfoSight is Nimble Storage’s data-sciences based approach to the storage lifecycle. Our Infosight engine gathers and analyses data from Nimble arrays, both collectively and individually, from the cloud, gathering millions of data points to identify potential problems – and provide solutions – in real time. Using the InfoSight Engine, Nimble’s support team can securely troubleshoot and configure arrays from a remote location, offer peer insights, and/or customised guidance. In fact, it is thanks to InfoSight that our arrays have achieved a collective system uptime greater than 99.999 percent - the gold standard for system availability.

Q Nimble also majors on the importance of ‘scale to fit’ and
‘scale out’ –why?

A Any combination of Nimble Storage hybrid arrays can be seamlessly configured into a storage cluster that accommodates growing business-critical workloads and supports new ones, without complicating storage management by creating additional silos or breaking the bank with forklift upgrades.
This scale-to-fit architecture is important because it allows customer to grow capacity and performance independently and non-disruptive when they need it. Scale-out support enables customers to scale capacity and performance beyond the physical limitations of a single array. So customers enjoy investment protection without being forced into an expensive solution that will expand their overall data footprint and add the complexity of silos.
Q The solution sweet spots for Nimble’s technology seems to be
server and desktop virtualisation, and data protection – is this
right?

A Desktop VDI and data protection are certainly areas where we have a strong story - and product portfolio – to show. In addition, Nimble offerings are very well suited for databases and business critical applications.
For VDI, Nimble delivers adaptive performance as the workload demands fluctuate rapidly. Nimble’s architecture that is highly optimises for writes lends itself really well to VDI which is write-intensive. Nimble’s compression and performance benefits are also particularly useful in database and BCA environments. Database admins appreciate the fact that very little tuning is required as the system optimises itself for these environments.
Similarly, traditional data protection techniques place a heavy load on IT infrastructure – data must be read from its source, moved across the network, and written onto a target backup device, a process that won’t doesn’t scale. Using efficient point-in-time snapshots, our storage solutions let customers easily and efficiently protect and restore data in minutes. Customers can also efficiently replicate volumes to a secondary array, transferring only compressed snapshot data to a secondary site—without needing additional hardware or software licenses.

Q Are there any other applications where Nimble is a good fit –
Cloud and Big Data, for example?

A One of our biggest focus areas is serving cloud service providers as a customer segment. This segment has been one of our fastest growing segments. While our ability to deliver 3-5 times better price performance, better data protection and simplicity appeals to service providers, one of our unique attributes is that our systems can be scaled very granularly in low-cost increments, non-disruptively as workloads change - from a very small initial foot-print to very large-scale deployments. This allows service providers to stage their investments and mimic an on-demand procurement model which in more in line with an on-demand payment model that they experience from their customers.
Nimble also performs very well in big data environments such as Vertica. In fact, Nimble’s large InfoSight database runs on Vertica.

Q Can you provide some details of the various alliances that
Nimble has with other vendors and the benefits these provide
end users?

A Building and maintaining alliances is a key focus for us at Nimble. We partner with leading IT vendors to develop and deliver pre-tested storage solutions including; Cisco, Citrix, CommVault, Microsoft and Oracle. This enables us to deliver a host of added benefits to end users such as aggressive performance, shortened deployment times, and a reduction in data footprint. For example, through our alliance with Cisco, SmartStack customers can leverage pre-tested solutions for virtual desktops and servers that reduce operational expenditures and enhance worker productivity, allowing enterprises to scale the number of end users based on their growing needs.

Q Can you provide one or two brief customer success stories?

A Our strong commitment to customer success, means that we have a large number of referenceable customer stories. Perhaps two of the most notable are BrightSource and Transform Medical.
Brightsource, a marketing services and technology company, runs very large data processing jobs and requires the ability to quickly process runs of over six million records. By leveraging the Nimble CS-Series arrays and Nimble InfoSight, Brightsource now replicates all of its application data every hour, its VMs every 12 hours, work in progress (WIP) every three hours, and the company’s archive data every 48 hours. The IT team also experienced a reduction in replication bandwidth consumption, reducing stress on other corporate services.
Transform Medical, a cosmetic surgery provider, stores and regularly accesses a large number of patient details as well as non-compressible images. But with 80 per cent of its connections and data processing happening within its data centres, it needed a high performance, high capacity solution that would allow them to archive data for a longer period of time. To meet these needs, Transform Medical procured a Nimble CS220 controller. This provides the company with approximately 20,000 IOPS, sub-millisecond latency to Transform’s environment and integrated data backup/restore — all in a 3U footprint and scalability for years to come. Just one week after installation, the CS220 made a massive impact in VM boot speed, SQL latency and compression (over two times the savings of SQL data).
Q What are Nimble’s routes to market – direct, Channel, a mixture?

A At Nimble, we operate a 100 per cent indirect strategy. This means we are fully committed to supporting and enabling the channel, with all partners viewed and treated as an extension of the Nimble Storage team. In the UK alone we have over 70 channel partners - including Cristie Data, NG-IT SITS Group and Softcat - and a two-tier distribution model consisting of Arrow and Ingram Micro. Over 60 per cent of our revenue arises from deal registrations from our partner base.
Q What expansion plans do you have in terms of increasing
this coverage?

A Unlike other companies, our channel strategy focuses on working with the right partners, rather than the most. So while we are always on the lookout for new partners, it’s more important for us to ensure that the fit is right.
Q What’s on Nimble’s technology roadmap over the next
12-18 months?

A I’m unable to reveal our roadmap, but over the next
12 – 18 months, we will continue to invest significantly in broadening our feature set. Some of the areas that we continue to invest in include continued scaling of our platforms to further extend
our price-performance advantage, delivering higher levels of availability and business continuity, deeper integration into application and hypervisor environments, further enhancing our already differentiated approach to data protection and so on.
Q The SSD/Flash market is still quite a crowded one, how do you
see it developing over time?

A Over the next several years, we believe that a massive shift will take place. Modular disk-centric storage systems which account for over 70 per cent of all networked storage will be displaced by flash-optimised hybrid storage systems that intelligently leverage the complementary characteristics of flash SSDs and low-cost,
high-density HDDs.
Q How do you see Nimble surviving/thriving in this competitive
market?

A Established storage companies are starting to take us seriously, so price competition is becoming more intense as large vendors fight harder for deals.