Cisco Live is coming to Melbourne next week – a perfect opportunity to reflect on Nimble Storage’s incredible progress in Australia and the rest of Asia-Pacific. The show, taking place March 5-8 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, will feature demonstrations of our SmartStack solution for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) – a joint reference architecture with Cisco and VMware for a 1,000 persistent seat VDI environment built on Nimble Storage, Cisco UCS and VMware View. It’s quite astounding what our storage can achieve in terms of performance and capacity in such a small footprint.
Nimble Storage has made an enormous impact in the Asia-Pacific enterprise storage market in a very short period of time. When I joined the company last July we had “bold” plans to grow the APAC team to three people by the end of January 2013 (our financial year end), and to sell 10 systems in that time.
Now, seven months later and only 4.5 months since we hired our first sales team, it’s hard to believe how wrong we were! We have grown the team to 14 people in Australia plus two in Singapore. In Australia, we have installed approximately 40 systems at more than 20 customers, and we’ve just sold our first system in New Zealand. We’ve also implemented a number of systems across Asia. What’s even more astounding is that many of these systems have gone into very large and mission-critical enterprise environments.
One of the team’s most notable wins is at a very large Australian bank for a 30,000-seat Microsoft Exchange environment. As with most companies, email at this bank is considered to be a “tier-1” (i.e.: mission-critical) application. And, as with most banks, they would never bet the farm on a risky solution.
It’s in this context that we confidently told the bank we could deliver our solution in just 21U of rack space and at a fraction of the cost of what our competitors could achieve in 6 full racks of traditional disk and flash. After several rounds of discussions, the proof was in the product. During December we installed a full-blown proof-of-concept configuration which more than exceeded their requirements. At the end, the combination of the product, our full-suite of software, our demonstrated support plus very compelling economics convinced the bank to go with Nimble Storage.
At Cisco Live Melbourne, we’ll be demonstrating the Nimble Storage flash-optimized arrays on Stand 73, and providing regular updates via Twitter (@NimbleStorageAU).
