Huy learned recently that the customer wanted to increase the performance of the system – three years after the initial system had been deployed.

First, the customer replaced all of the old flash solid state drives (SSDs) in the system to higher capacity SSDs during the day, watching the amount of cache increase, even as the system continued operations with no disruption to any applications. That evening, Huy arrived and pulled out the old controller and popped in a new, higher performance CS420 controller. He then failed back to the upgraded controller, and replaced the second older controller with a newer CS420 controller. No downtime or disruption to any application, and the performance was now three times higher than with the CS220! The system was now brand new, ready to chug along for several more years.

Having been in the storage industry for a long time, I know that non-disruptive software upgrades are marketed far more often than they are truly realized in customer data centers. Non-disruptive controller upgrades and cache upgrades are non-existent within mid-range enterprise storage systems. This is one of the many capabilities of our architecture that is allowing us to earn customer appreciation and build a strong customer community!

There are three main reasons we chose this location:

• A great facility that’s compatible with our culture. The new buildings have just been modernized, with lots of natural lighting, open meeting areas, a flexible floor plan, and space for a variety of outdoor activities. The three buildings and the beautifully landscaped spaces between them are ideal for the kinds of conversations, informal collaboration and free-for-all chats that characterize daily life at Nimble.
• Customized by us for us. We are working with a clean slate in terms of interior layout and design, which allows us to engage our employees in creating spaces that help bring us together – both professionally and socially. People throughout the company have already provided some terrific ideas and suggestions that we’re incorporating into the design.
• Location, location, location: San Jose has served us well for over the past five years, and has allowed us to attract a world-class talent pool. Staying in San Jose allows us to continue to build the organization, without increasing commute times for existing employees.

 We are eagerly looking forward to moving to our new headquarters in November, at 211 River Oaks Parkway, San Jose.

• InfoSight transforms the paradigm for how storage systems have been traditionally monitored and supported, by introducing the notion of “cloud managed storage infrastructure”.
• NimbleConnect is our new community site, where storage and IT pros can share InfoSight data and leverage the collective insights of their peers to answer their questions and optimize their storage systems..

The foundation for InfoSight and NimbleConnect was laid very early – from a realization that in addition to our groundbreaking storage architecture, scaling the company to tens of thousands of global customers would also require a disruptive and innovative approach to scaling customer support.

The Cloud Allows Us to Rethink Traditional Ways of Monitoring Infrastructure

The traditional support process starts with a customer being alerted to a problem either because of a service disruption to their internal end-users or because on-site monitoring software points to an error condition.  The customer then calls the vendor’s support center where a level-one support engineer asks basic questions and gathers configuration information. For any serious problem, the customer’s call typically gets escalated to a level-two support engineer who then asks the customer to gather and upload an enormous amount of diagnostic information.  This part of the support process can leave the customer frustrated and anxious that too much time has been has been spent on information gathering rather than on problem solving.

InfoSight challenges this traditional process by applying the following basic beliefs to the process:

1. Connectivity.  In a connected world, there is no reason why we cannot monitor our customer-deployed systems like they do.  Therefore, we should know when our systems face a support incident at the same time as a customer does.
2. Comprehensive database with extensive health information gathered proactively.  In a connected world, instead of reactively asking a customer for information when a problem occurs, we should be gathering a wealth of information proactively from our customer-deployed systems – system health information, meta-data, system logs and so on.  What is critical though is to gather information on a frequent basis, since the industry practice of gathering nightly logs and daily phone-home capabilities is too coarse in time.

Today, InfoSight allows us to monitor heartbeats and gather system health information securely from our customer deployed systems every few minutes, resulting in ~30 million sensor values per system, per day in our database!

Deep Data Analytics Can Help Transform Support into a Predictive Process

Going back to the traditional support process, even after all the diagnostic information has been gathered, it takes support organizations a long time to bring the right expertise to bear on the specific customer problem.  What is altogether too frequent and frustrating to a customer is when they are told that the specific problem they encountered is from a known defect, and are then provided a software patch that they need to apply.  The customer is left wondering why they were not informed ahead of time about the potential problem.

In rethinking this process, InfoSight leverages another core belief:

1. Deep Data Analytics Can Predict Problems.  We have a team of data scientists and support engineers that apply advanced analytics and statistical modeling to the wealth of near-real-time information to predict when things could go wrong.  We look for early warnings that can point to potential problems.  When one customer encounters an issue, we immediately query our database to identify other potentially vulnerable customers.  We look for customer implementations that do not adhere to best practices.  The support database and the algorithms and data models that we use to query the database have become a core operational process within our engineering and support organizations.

The best proof-point of the efficiency of this approach is in the fact over 80% of all our support cases are ones where we call a customer to either address an impending issue or prevent an issue!

Going Beyond Support: Cloud-Based Monitoring with InfoSight

We have been leveraging the capabilities of InfoSight to deliver superior support for the last two years.  The next logical evolution of InfoSight was to put the power of all the information and the analytical capabilities in the hands of our customers.

When we looked at the on-site monitoring applications that most customers deploy from incumbent storage vendors, the approach that such software applications use is to poll storage systems on a frequent basis to create an event database which is then transformed into visual graphs – trending information, capacity forecasts, performance monitors, etc.

Leveraging the deep data that we gather from all our customer-installed systems, the InfoSight Portal is a Cloud-based application that allows customers to monitor their infrastructure without the complexity of on-premise software, licenses and agents.

More than 200 customers have already deployed the InfoSight service to generate real-time alerts, forecast their capacity requirements, size their system upgrade needs, monitor application backups, report on the success of their disaster recovery implementations and more.  Every day we continue to hear from our customers on how the InfoSight portal saved the day for them:

• The service provider customer who kept adding more and more workloads and used InfoSight to gauge exactly how much CPU, cache and capacity they needed to keep their applications running in top condition.
• The enterprise customer who had strict policies tied to data protection, who was able to detect the one time his VMware snapshot failed causing his RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) goals to be missed, and was able to immediately rectify it.
• The retail customer with arrays in multiple data centers who regularly uses the capacity usage and change rates to compute how much bandwidth she needs to provision to replicate her snapshots across sites.

The list goes on and on.

NimbleConnect: A Community Centered around Real-World Insights from InfoSight

When we shared the InfoSight vision with the industry’s most prominent analysts and influencers, the feedback was overwhelming.  Why restrict this to just Nimble customers, these experts asked.  Why not share these insights with the broader storage community who can benefit from access to this type of information? And thus was born Nimble Connect – the Nimble storage community.

At Nimble, we believe that our single most important asset is our customer base, and our single most important priority is to foster a satisfied customer community.  NimbleConnect provides a platform for these customers to share their stories, best practices, tips and tricks, scripts, and other valuable technical resources.

Furthermore, it takes the insights gleaned from the installed base through InfoSight and returns them back to our customers, where they can be discussed and enhanced. A customer in a particular vertical market looking to deploy VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for the first time can now learn what their peers in other institutions are doing with regards to size of the virtual desktop. Microsoft Exchange admins can learn what the installed base is doing when it came to protecting their Exchange environments with snapshots. The NimbleConnect portal uses the richness of InfoSight to provide these and many other insights.

InfoSight and NimbleConnect are the first steps in a vision around how we can transform a customer’s support experience and a customer’s access to peer insights.  The vision was made possible by leveraging the cloud for unprecedented near-real-time information about how our customers use their systems, and by leveraging deep data analytics to transform that information into predictive actions and insights.  We are merely at the beginning of what we believe is possible.  We welcome you to sign up on NimbleConnect and help us make it better.

“Gartner expects the advantages of the traditional high-end enterprise storage arrays to disappear over the next three to five years, because the pace of innovation is occurring faster in the larger and more dynamic midrange segment of the storage market,” creating a big opportunity for Nimble.

Innovation is at the core of everything Nimble Storage does – whether it is leveraging breakthrough software techniques to provide 5x better performance than the competition, delivering superior capacity efficiency, unprecedented flexibility to customers in scaling their storage, or leveraging data sciences to deliver world-class proactive support.

But it doesn’t stop there. For sustained success, companies need to be creative and intelligent not just in building products, but in taking them to market. That’s why we’re proud of our exclusive focus on selling through channels, of our strong alliance partnerships, and most of all, of our very loyal customer base.

To read more about this, please refer to the press release on Nimble’s website as well as the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

A Strong Foundation

Over the course of the last six months, our Asia-Pacific team, led by Peter O’ Connor, has laid a very strong foundation:

• An incredible team. Our team has grown very quickly from two employees six months ago to 14 employees now, with four more joining us in the next two weeks. What is so gratifying is that the team has quickly embraced the culture, is very experienced, and is truly passionate about the value proposition of our technology.
• We have attracted very experienced channel partners to join the Nimble community. In the space of just six months, we have recruited about 30 partners in Australia and in Singapore, and I had an opportunity to meet with over half of them. Almost all the partners resell storage systems from one or both of the market leaders, EMC and NetApp, and bring an enormous amount of industry experience to bear. They clearly see the disruptive potential of our products that are designed ground-up to intelligently leverage flash SSDs.  They also see the value we bring to their customers – in dramatically lowering the capital cost of storage, improving data protection service levels and making the management of storage much simpler.
• A rapidly growing installed base. In Australia, we already have an installed base of over 40 deployments ­– spanning a wide range of workloads including databases, Microsoft Exchange, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and file services, most often deployed in virtualized environments. I met with several of our customers, most of whom are willing to act as a reference and talk about their Nimble experience.

A Scorching Pace of Activity

At the end of two weeks, I came back with no doubt in my mind that we are on the verge of explosive growth in the region. What convinced me is the sheer pace of activity that the team is able to sustain:

• Meeting 50+ prospective customers. Over the course of five different round-table conversations and many one-on-one meetings, I had a chance to present the Nimble story to many different prospects, several of whom are in various stages of deploying proof of concept projects with us.
• Peer-to-peer networking event with ~40 customers in attendance. On the last day of my trip, we held a terrific customer peer-to-peer event, coordinated by Amy Webb on our marketing team. The highlight of the event was when two of our early customers, Australian Institute of Management and M&C Saatchi, presented their evaluation process and the concrete benefits they saw from deploying Nimble.
• Meetings with key leaders at our strategic alliance partners. I also got a chance to meet with the key leaders at Cisco, VMware, and CommVault. It was gratifying to see corporate alliances translating into meaningful and productive field relationships.

Coincidentally, one of our most recent customers in New Zealand is an avid blogger, who at the same time shared a couple of posts about his early impressions of deploying Nimble:

• Storage Efficiency with Nimble Compression
  (http://vstorage.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/initial-performance-impressions-of-nimble-storage/)
• Initial Performance Impressions of Nimble Storage
  (http://vstorage.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/initial-performance-impressions-of-nimble-storage/)

The View from “Down Under”

The prospective customers I met with represented a wide range of industries, and included mid-sized enterprises as well as very large enterprises. Some of the engagements we are working on include Australia’s largest enterprises in the financial services sector, government agencies, retailers, universities, telecommunications companies, media companies and professional services organizations – many of whom are in the process of conducting active pilots. These organizations share our conviction that a major transformation is underway in storage architectures because of flash solid-state drives (SSDs): hybrid systems that intelligently marry the complementary benefits of flash SSDs and low-cost, high-density hard disk drives (HDDs) are displacing traditional disk-centric storage platforms, with incumbent storage companies unable to compete against ground-up designs. The best moments were when our customers presented their experiences at the peer-to-peer networking event ­–significant capital cost reductions, operating cost reductions, and improved recoverability through the use of snapshots and replication.

Some Unique Attributes

Customer perspectives around storage tend to be similar across geographies, but there were a couple of attributes that struck me as being different about the market in Australia.

First, IT organizations in Australia seem much more willing to adopt new technologies if the technology and benefits are compelling. The pace at which Australia adopted server virtualization is a good proof point of this market characteristic.  Second, private cloud and public cloud deployments are all the rage in Australia with almost every large enterprise at varying stages of deploying private clouds and numerous service providers offering infrastructure as a service. Since efficient infrastructure is the life-blood of service providers, they have become one of our fastest growing customer segments.  (http://www.nimblestorage.com/blog/technology/cloud-service-providers-opportunity-or-threat/)

Both of these attributes bode well for Nimble.

Exhausting and Yet, Exhilarating!

I love traveling and making calls with our field teams. When I travel, I typically have three broad goals. First and perhaps most important goal is for me to listen and learn, to correlate business results and metrics to a subjective understanding of what is taking place in the market place. Second, I travel to ensure that field teams have a connection to the rest of the company. Sales teams are isolated into small remote teams, particularly in smaller companies, and I leverage my visits to establish context for various activities and decisions that are being made in the company. Thirdly, I help the sales teams progress their campaigns with prospective customers and strengthen their relationships with channel partners and alliance partners. This trip could not have gone any better on all three counts.

I normally do not travel for more than a week at a time, as I really value my weekends with my family. Having said that, I could not be more thrilled about my experience over the last two weeks. We have assembled an incredibly talented team in a very short period of time – a team that is setting an intensely active pace of recruiting partners, generating interest within prospective customers, driving proof of concept engagements and converting prospects into customers.

Different Customers, But Facing Some Common Challenges

Each of the three customers was different but had some common characteristics in terms of challenges that they faced.

1. The application hosting services arm of a large technology consulting organization that delivers hosted Microsoft applications to end customers leveraging their expertise, ability to deliver high availability and manage deployments at scale. For example, they host over a million customer mailboxes as a managed service.
2. A regional bank with over a hundred branches in the mid-west, deploying Microsoft SQL databases, Exchange, Citrix and Citrix XenApp servers on virtualized infrastructure using VMware  with vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM).
3. A leading provider of hybrid cloud services that offers public and private cloud service to mid-market customers using a VMware-based platform and leveraging their own unified management portal as a differentiator.

All three customers evaluated us as a result of some key challenges that they faced with their incumbent solutions. The table below is an extract of some of the problems as presented by the customers:

They Put Us Through an Extensive Testing Process

All three customers evaluated us thoroughly before making the switch.

• The application hosting company evaluated over 6 different storage platforms – three very large storage vendors, two start-ups offering flash-only arrays, and one other hybrid storage start-up. They went through an extensive 10,000 mailbox Exchange test conducted over several weeks.
• The regional bank tested us for their database environment and then migrated all of their Citrix XenApp Servers on to the Nimble Storage arrays during the proof-of-concept process given the performance headroom on the array.
• The cloud service provider tested us for a large telecom client hosting large databases with heavy input/output (IO) loads.

Compelling Benefits

Thank you to each of the three customers for choosing us: (i) The Application hosting company has deployed 7 Nimble arrays for a total capacity of ~280TB across two locations; (ii) The regional bank has deployed ~70TB across a production and disaster recovery (DR) site; and (iii) The cloud service provider has deployed over 300TB across 9 Nimble arrays.

The best part of the presentation at kickoff was to hear each of the customers present some very compelling evidence of the benefits that they saw from deploying Nimble Storage.

1. Significant capital cost and operating cost reductions. All three customers commented on the dramatically fewer resources needed with Nimble compared to all of the alternatives.

• In their initial deployment, the application hosting company replaced the incumbent vendor’s storage system made up of 300 drives with two of our arrays comprising 8 SSDs (solid state drives) and 24 high-density HDDs (hard disk drives). They saved $10,500 a month just on data center and rack space charges. The capital cost reductions were even more significant. The accompanying picture is the slide that the customer presented showing two racks of competitors’ products being replaced by 6U of Nimble storage arrays.

• The regional bank save significantly on rack density and capital costs. Compression alone was able to reduce the data footprint of their databases by a factor of 3.
• The capital cost of the combined Cisco + VMware + Nimble solution was 50% lower than the alternative, while providing additional savings through compression and lower monthly rental charges.

2. Performance. As an example, the regional bank saw much improved ESX boot times, and was able to host not just the databases that saw poor performance but was also able to migrate Citrix XenApp servers given the high performance. The cloud service provider was able to eliminate all of the extensive tuning that they had to do in the past to achieve the performance needed for their clients.
3. Data Protection. The regional banking customer and the Application hosting company have both implemented a data protection scheme that leverages local snapshots and remote replication coupled with VMware SRM. The Application hosting company is now in the process of integrating Nimble snapshots into CommVault’s backup application. Every one of their customers is now able to create almost instantaneous backups and is able to recover rapidly in the event of a problem.
4. Simplicity of Management. In every instance, our customers commented on how much simpler it was to manage a Nimble environment – both in terms of initial deployment as well as on a day-to-day basis.
5. Dramatically Better Support Experience. One attribute of Nimble that every customer commented on very positively was his experience of dealing with our support organization. The attributes that stood out about our support were as follows:

• Through our remote support automation, we have the information we need to solve all the problems fast
• We care deeply enough to solve issues, even when they are outside our domain
• We do not let issues fester and we marshal the internal resources needed to address a problem quickly.

One of the main goals of any sales kick-off is to motivate the sales organization and arm the sales teams with confidence in the strength of our solutions. Nothing could have accomplished this goal as well as the customer presentations did, when they articulated their challenges, their decision process and why they chose Nimble Storage.

Our Mission and Core Beliefs
Our mission as an organization is “To deliver the world’s most efficient data storage solutions to enterprises.” We are targeting a broad range of mainstream enterprise applications, and we believe that doing so effectively requires simultaneously optimizing a combination of attributes – performance efficiency, capacity efficiency, data protection, and dramatic simplicity; and that we want to be the best when a customer tries to optimize more than one of these criteria.

This mission is informed by some core beliefs that underpin our product strategy:

• Intelligent hybrid storage systems – designed from the ground up to flexibly combine the complementary characteristics of flash SSDs and HDDs – represent the next generation of storage, delivering dramatically better performance and dramatically better usable capacity simultaneously, with unparalleled economics.
• A system that can accommodate thousands of space-efficient and performance-efficient snapshots, coupled with WAN-optimized replication, represents the next generation of data protection – delivering dramatically lower backup and recovery times and minimizing the amount of data at risk.
• Simplicity and ease of operations are critical – not just in initial setup where the industry has made good progress, but more importantly, in how systems are supported on a day-to-day basis through remote support automation and system telemetry that facilitates deep insights into how customers are using their systems.

There have been two alternative approaches advocated by the industry, both of which we believe fall short:

1. Legacy storage arrays that layer in SSDs coupled with auto-tiering software will improve price-performance but fall severely short of being competitive with ground-up designs that deliver all-flash array-like performance with a much smaller amount of flash SSDs.
2. All-flash arrays leverage flash in the most obvious manner, and will indeed be relevant for high-performance niches. However, they fall severely short of being competitive in addressing the broad requirements of mainstream enterprise applications in the area of capacity efficiency, and are simply not cost effective to store hundreds of snapshots for rapid recoverability or to replicate data for disaster recovery.

FY13 (Feb 2012 – Jan 2013): A Very Strong Year
We executed very well against our mission last year on every dimension, with annualized orders well in excess of $100M in Q4:

• We have built a customer community of well over 1,100 customers – thank you! During Q4, we went past the 1,100-customer benchmark, with over 2,000 systems deployed, having added 321 customers in the fourth quarter alone. What is more critical for us though is to foster a deep relationship with every customer founded on our deep commitment to their success, which we believe will translate into our customers becoming invested in our success! This is perhaps our most important goal, and one of the best proof-points of our success against this goal in FY13 is the willingness of our entire customer base to act as references and to advocate on our behalf.
• We have built a robust channel partner ecosystem of over 400 partners – thank you! One of our core go-to-market philosophies has been to embrace our partners as an extension of our organization, to drive demand generation for them even as we leverage their existing customer relationships, and to ensure their profitability. We are executing well against this philosophy and have expanded our global channel ecosystem to over 400 partners.
• We made significant strides towards becoming a global company. During the last year, we expanded our global presence significantly. We now have employees in the UK, Germany, Scandinavia, Benelux, Australia and Singapore and conduct business in several more countries through partners that further expand our scope of operations. Further, to better support our customers, we have added support centers in Raleigh, North Carolina and in the UK.
• We extended our innovation lead through new high-performance arrays, our scale-to-fit launch and numerous feature enhancements. In just 5 months since we launched these new capabilities, our higher-end arrays and our scaling capabilities have allowed us to win significantly larger deals, as we added numerous “multi-100 TB” and “double-digit-site” customers. There were other enhancements such as deeper integration with CommVault, richer integration with VMware APIs, etc. – all of which enhance our differentiation and expand our solution scope.
• Our investment in solutions with alliance partners is paying off. We invested significantly in strengthening our alliance relationships with a range of industry participants. For example, our partnership with CommVault through the IntelliSnap™ Connect program strengthened our data protection solutions. Similarly, our partnership with VMware and Cisco culminated in the SmartStack reference architecture – we now have hundreds of customers implementing BYOD initiatives and using us for VDI deployments.

All of what we achieved in FY13 would not have been possible without the enormous efforts of our Nimble employees – thanks to each and every one of them! We continue to strengthen our organizational foundation as we added almost 200 employees during the year, spanning every function – all without sacrificing our core principle of “hiring no jerks”!

A Rich Agenda As We Look Ahead
We have a lot to do as we look at the year ahead.

We believe that we can continue to set records in terms of top-line growth and pace of customer acquisition, through continuing to invest in a robust channel ecosystem and systematically expanding our global presence. Further, we also saw a diversification of our customer base (from mid-sized enterprises) to include several large, global enterprises and large service providers in FY13, and we expect that trend to accelerate over the next 12 months. As our customer base expands rapidly, we have some exciting plans for how we can further build out our customer community in FY14.

Our innovation agenda for FY14 is very rich, as we expect to significantly strengthen our ability to simultaneously deliver performance and capacity efficiency and scale to very large environments, and as we deliver some exciting new functionality aimed at dramatically simplifying storage management and data center operations for our customers.

As we strive to meet some ambitious goals for next year, we expect to continue to build our organizational foundation further by adding 200-250 people in the next 12 months. The key for us is to do so without diluting our hiring standards and without diluting our culture.

I look forward to another exciting year for Nimble Storage!!

Over the last few months, I have had conversations with numerous financial analysts and industry analysts and a question that comes up frequently is whether or not cloud service providers pose a threat to product manufacturers. They are surprised when I describe how deployments by cloud service providers are one of the fastest growing segments of our business. Not only are we acquiring dozens of customers in this segment, including Virtacore (see today’s press release), they are also some of our largest customers! I find myself offering this explanation fairly frequently. Hence this blog post.

Let us start by parsing cloud delivered solutions based on a couple of key dimensions:

• What is being deployed in the cloud?
• Who is providing the IT service from the cloud?

The Opportunity is Larger than the Threat

The image conjured up by the term “cloud” is that of companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft delivering large-scale computing infrastructure that eliminate the need for on-premises IT equipment and software. To the extent that Enterprises port their applications to leverage Amazon EC2 or the Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, these Enterprises are indeed displacing on-premises infrastructure. Further, since these cloud providers build their own infrastructure rather than buying from product manufacturers, they are indeed shrinking the available market for product manufacturers.

However, there are other categories of service providers that on balance, more than offset the reduced spend and create an opportunity.

• Consumer SaaS providers aggregate consumer-spend into Centralized Shared Enterprise Infrastructure. Consumer applications that traditionally consumed end user equipment (PCs, PC applications, etc.) are moving to the cloud triggering a need for Enterprise infrastructure. While some of these service providers build their own infrastructure (e.g., gmail), others leverage product manufacturers. Example: Yahoo Mail
• Enterprise SaaS providers aggregate SMB requirements into Centralized Shared Enterprise Infrastructure. A key customer segment that SaaS providers target is small businesses that would otherwise never have invested in Enterprise IT infrastructure. Consequently SaaS companies end up aggregating SMB spend into Centralized Shared Enterprise Infrastructure, and while some SaaS companies may end up building it on their own, most are focused on their core areas of expertise, choosing instead to deploy best of breed infrastructure from product manufacturers. Examples: ServiceNOW, Salesforce
• Modern hosting companies aggregate SMB spend into Centralized Shared Enterprise Infrastructure. Traditional hosting companies thrived on renting real estate, power and cooling. Now these same companies are evolving into renting hypervisors (and all the servers, networking, storage and other infrastructure that comes with a hypervisor) or renting virtual desktops or renting DR infrastructure. Examples: Virtacore, Desktone

The key to leveraging the opportunity lies in recognizing that the requirements posed by such service providers is different.

Centralized Shared Infrastructure Requires Rethinking Traditional Approaches

While we believe that cloud delivered IT solutions and applications create an opportunity, we also believe that the requirements posed by cloud providers are different. Specifically, as it relates to storage infrastructure, some of the dimensions that matter more are as follows:

1. Efficiency. For end customers, making IT efficient is important as a way to manage costs for the Enterprise. For service providers, on the other hand, efficient IT infrastructure is the very essence of their business success. Lowering the cost of infrastructure allows them to price their services more competitively to gain market share and improve profitability.
2. Flexibility in Scaling. The storage industry has traditionally deployed incremental storage performance and storage capacity in big “capital intensive” chunks at a time. What is needed is an approach that allows service providers to scale performance and capacity in small, low-cost increments – thus making IT equipment costs more variable and aligned with revenues. Perhaps, an even more critical requirement is to avoid fork-lift upgrades of hardware and to be able to perform “rolling hardware upgrades” that are non-disruptive.
3. Rapid Recoverability. For service providers that operate against stringent SLAs, the notion of nightly backups and backup windows is simply not good enough. What is needed is the ability to provide hundreds of recovery points and rapid recovery from any such point for applications.
4. Dramatic Simplicity. Lowering the administrative cost of operating a large-scale data center with hundreds of tenants is key to profitably for service provider. To this end, most service providers rely on extensive in-house automation that requires extensive APIs and deep integration with hypervisor vendors. Similarly, the traditional support model of responding to customer calls with a layered, hierarchical organization comprised of level1 engineers, level2 engineers and escalation engineers will not suffice. In a connected world, Vendors will need to have sophisticated remote monitoring tools that recognize problems concurrently as they occur at customer sites, and remote diagnostic tools that allow for rapid problem diagnosis and problem resolution.
5. Integrated Security. Gaining the trust of Enterprises through robust security becomes a foundation for persuading them to move their data and applications to a third party. This requires a much deeper investment in integrated security (as opposed to security as a separate layer) on the part of product manufacturers, even if they are not building security products.
6. Multi-Tenancy. Going back to the theme of driving efficiency, the ability to share infrastructure across multiple users while simultaneously maintaining good quality of service drives superior economics.

We have seen a rapid increase in the number of deployments of our products by service providers. The key drivers of this have been our unparalleled efficiency in simultaneously lowering the cost of capacity and cost of performance, our ability to scale in low-cost increments and scale non-disruptively, our ability to deliver superior data recoverability, and our simplicity and remote support automation. I believe that we are just at the very early stages of leveraging the opportunity, and am excited about the partnerships we are building with our service provider customers.

No man is an island, said the famous English poet John Donne, and no storage product is an island either. Over the last couple of years, there has been growing interest in pre-validated vertical stacks of application, server, hypervisor, networking and storage. Industry analysts like Wikibon have in fact predicted that over half of the entire infrastructure consumed would move towards pre-validated reference architectures, rather than as independently procured servers, storage and networking products.

Companies such as HP, Dell and IBM have responded to this by essentially repositioning their portfolio of existing products as converged infrastructure. I fundamentally do not believe that customers will be willing to sacrifice best of breed technologies and embrace inferior products, just because they are packaged into integrated infrastructure offerings that come from a single vendor.  There is a reason why EMC and NetApp have gained share in storage, and why Cisco has maintained a dominant share in networking.

Having said that, I have encountered numerous customers over the last years that have felt palpable pain stemming from having to integrate best-of-breed servers, hypervisor, networking and storage. Solutions such as Flexpod and VCE have been more successful than single vendor solutions – true reference architectures that address both problems – deliver best-of-breed products while also relieving the customer from having to integrate best-of-breed products from multiple vendors.

Today, we are proud and excited to announce the Nimble SmartStack. The first SmartStack offering is targeted at VDI workloads, working closely with VMware and Cisco to produce an integrated solution that has been tested for interoperability, performance and fast deployment, and has been endorsed by all three companies.  Several months ago, we announced the certification of our storage platform as part of the VMware rapid desktop program.  Today, we are proud to be among a small number of storage platforms that are UCS certified.  There are three major benefits from the SmartStack solution:

1. Economically-Viable, Converged Infrastructure Solution for Mid-Sized Enterprises. Nimble was able to bring dramatic economic benefits through substantially higher performance, lower cost of capacity, dramatically better business continuity and operational simplicity to a mid-sized Enterprise – customers that were otherwise unable to deploy VDI projects because the cost of a pre-integrated converged infrastructure stack was prohibitively expensive.
2. Best-of-Breed Flash-Optimized Storage, Available as Converged Infrastructure. The Nimble architecture is unparalleled in its ability to leverage flash for high performance along with low-cost HDDs for low cost of capacity. What further distinguishes our approach and makes us particularly well suited for workloads such as VDI is that our scale-to-fit architecture (see white paper ») allows us to be extremely flexible – we can increase the ratio of flash within our system when workloads such as VDI need higher performance or lower the ratio of flash when workload such as file services need greater capacity – thus spanning an extremely broad range of workloads.
3. Channel Leverage. Over the last two years, we have built a rapidly growing base of over 300 channel partners, most of whom were already Cisco partners and VMware partners. Our SmartStack approach allows us to leverage that synergy and rapidly bring the solution to market.

Our partnerships with the ecosystem vendors continue to flourish which means more SmartStack solutions and fewer headaches and more value for end customers. Stay tuned for more on this front.

Hybrid Storage Arrays Simultaneously Optimize Performance and Capacity

One of the core founding beliefs that Nimble Storage started with is that flash SSDs are dramatically disruptive – an order of magnitude better at random reads; good at random writes but with the caveat that random writes come at the cost of flash endurance. They are, however, not so good at other things. They are not as good on sequential IO per $, and they are particularly bad on cost of capacity ($/GB) when compared to high density, low-cost HDDs.

Another factor that influences our belief in hybrid storage arrays is the diversity of workloads that are deployed on networked storage systems. When we look at our own experience across 1,000+ deployments, most of our arrays are used to consolidate storage for databases, file servers, Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint documents and so on – all on the same storage platform. Some of these workloads are performance-hungry and sensitive to latency, and would benefit from a significant portion or even all of the workload being contained on flash SSDs. Other workloads do not need the performance that flash can deliver, and would rather be optimized for lower cost of capacity.

Given that both flash SSDs and high-density, low-cost HDDs are good at some attributes and poor at others, our belief is that the ideal storage array should leverage the complementary strengths of both media types. Further, when considering the wide variety of workloads in an enterprise and the relative benefits of flash-accelerated performance across those workloads, we believe that a hybrid storage array that is flexible in how it handles various workloads is the ideal solution.

In fact, we believe that hybrid storage arrays represent a major transformation of the traditional, modular storage arrays that have come to become the mainstay of networked storage deployments in most enterprises!

Hybrid Storage Platforms Enable A Transformation in Data Protection

Since the early 1990s, NetApp has been the pioneer of using snapshots for data protection. Most storage systems, to this day, support a small number of snapshots either because array performance degrades when you have too many snapshots and/or the amount of space needed for each incremental snapshot is significant. In contrast, NetApp’s WAFL file system enabled dozens of snapshots that could reside alongside the primary application instance without any performance penalty. The incremental space consumption associated with each snapshot in WAFL was also relatively small in that only changed, incremental 4KB blocks were stored in snapshots.

This advantage results in most NetApp customers leveraging snapshots for rapid recovery in day-to-day operations – recovering in seconds instead of hours or days.  Despite major data recovery benefits, many NetApp customers often end up storing only a small number of snapshots, relying instead on a separate backup system for backups beyond a few days worth of protection. This is because of cost concerns – the snapshots live on the same media as primary application data – expensive, high-RPM drives for even modestly performance-hungry applications!

In sharp contrast, Data Domain leveraged storage systems using low-cost SATA drives combined with data de-duplication and compression to be a cost-effective and dramatically simpler alternative to tapes for backups.  Tape elimination drove rapid growth even though the ability to recover data only improved marginally.

Ideally, you would have both – the low cost of de-duplicated, SATA based arrays and the rapid recovery provided by snapshots and replication. A well-designed hybrid storage array can do just that – it would leverage low-cost, high-density HDDs and employ in-line data compression, while well-designed snapshots would eliminate duplicate blocks across thousands of backup versions and also enable recovery in seconds.

In fact, we believe that hybrid storage arrays will enable a transformation in data protection approaches as most operational backup and recovery will rely on snapshots and replication.

Gartner endorses this view in saying that “a major advantage of snapshots over backup software is that they scale very well.  No data movement means near instantaneous application recoveries.”  The fact that major backup vendors like CommVault are cataloging array-based snapshots and treating them as first class citizens alongside tape backups is indicative that this shift is already underway.

Are All Hybrid Storage Arrays Created Equal?

The founding premise that Nimble started with is now becoming widely accepted, as industry observers generally believe that the bulk of mid-range storage systems will evolve towards hybrid storage systems that leverage flash and HDDs.  In my next blog, I will talk about another core belief that we started with – that all hybrid storage arrays are NOT created equal, and designing the ideal hybrid storage array requires a ground-up design!