This past week, I was fortunate to travel to Indonesia and participate in our launch activities there along with my colleagues Peter O’Connor (Nimble Storage’s vice president for the APAC region), Rachel Ler (ASEAN Sales Manager), and Daniel Tan (Channel Manager for ASEAN).

Indonesia has a growing economy with a real requirement for storage solutions that provide higher performing, capacity-optimised solutions in a smaller footprint. Based on many of the conversations we had, datacenter space is becoming an issue for many organisations, as well as the skyrocketing costs of electricity. The feedback we were given was that our technology is welcomed in the local market and couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

Our visit began with a series of detailed planning sessions with our local distribution partner, discussing how we can best service and support our customers across Indonesia. We came up with plenty of creative ideas that I’m sure our customers will love. In the afternoon we were lucky enough to present to 35 local resellers who understood the true value of our technology and quickly identified that Nimble Storage is the right solution for many of their customers in the local market. I was so impressed with their knowledge and the types of questions they asked.

In Jakarta, Refany Iskandar (Director of Optima Solusindo Informatika) joins Peter O’Connor and Theo Hourmouzis for the official launch of Nimble Storage in Indonesia.

The official launch took place the following day at Planet Hollywood, starting with a presentation to more than 20 press and media agencies. Peter spoke briefly about our organisation and I spoke a little further about our solutions and the value it provides customers. Similar to the reseller event, the questions and discussion afterwards proved to me that we could not have arrived at a better time. Seeing the press so excited about our organisation is a good sense of validation.

That afternoon more than 30 customers attending the launch, where we discussed our unique approach to storage, describing the typical customer scenarios we see daily and how our technology can address those challenges. Post presentation we were all able to dine together on some local cuisine, talking in detail about what makes Nimble Storage so different.

Reflecting back, it was an amazing trip – meeting wonderful people, establishing important relationships, and enjoying the extraordinary sights of Indonesia.

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.

The Nimrod Champions!
Back Row (L-R): David, Team Cofounder John Farcich, Mathew Zarate, Patrick Haverty, Mike Nangle, Bo Nielson, Joey
Front Row: Sylvia, Jessica Fung, Nina Urzi

But then, something changed: the Nimrods won a game. And then another game. And then all the other games after that, until it all came down to the championship game. Final inning. Two out; Bo Nielson, from Nimble’s inside sales team, walks up to the plate. A ball. A strike. And then – crack – a hard shot off the wall, Bo furiously rounding the bases, a throw to home, Bo diving for the plate, Bo just beating the tag, and the Nimrods win it all!

This moment – and the lunch-hour cricket games in the back parking lot, the Friday night beer bashes and poker games – this is what a company’s culture is all about. The elusive “work-life balance” that every Silicon Valley start-up strives to provide has never been something that the HR department, or even the leadership team, can manufacture – it’s something that must grow organically from the start.

It helps to have the company’s founders articulate a clear vision of core values; at Nimble Storage this starts with the on-boarding process and new hire training. Better still, at Nimble each employee answers a survey every 90 days, focusing on company culture and how we’re performing against those core values. As Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh says, “We believe if we get the culture right, we’ll get everything else right.”

Ultimately, it all comes down to hiring. It takes great people to build a great company. The kind of people who integrate flash and disk from the ground up, with a proprietary file system, rather than just bolting them together. The kind of people who can stare down a 0 – 3 record, start winning games, and keep winning all the way to a championship. Sure, it’s just the Twin Creeks industrial league in Sunnyvale, CA, but it’s still a championship.

Nimble Storage has go-to-market programs, special incentives and a wide range of activities designed for channel partners around our SmartStack solutions. These pre-validated architectures, inclusive of Nimble Storage working with VMware and Cisco, provide scalable and cost-effective virtual desktop infrastructure for midsized IT environments.

We’ll have a team of experts from our technical marketing group available at the Nimble Storage booth (#802) to answer any questions you may have on how to help customers with their journey to VDI, cloud and beyond. For instance, you can learn more about the recently announced 1,000-seat VDI reference architecture using Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers, Nimble Storage CS-Series and VMware View 5.1.

You can find a complete list of our Partner Exchange resources here: http://info.nimblestorage.com/PEXLasVegasFebruary2013.html

Tech heads won’t want to miss these technical sessions:

• CI1435 – Site Recovery Manager – Technical Walkthrough by Ken Wernerburg of VMware
• TEX1160 – Virtualizing Latency Sensitive Applications by Tim Harris of VMware
• TEX1138 – vSphere 5.1 New Storage Features by Cormac Hogan of VMware

See you at VMware PEX 2013!

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!!

I’ve been in the storage industry for over a decade and have worked with Cisco on many storage and networking fronts in that time. Things have changed lately. Several months ago, I got introduced to the UCS as a converged server and network solution for our Technical Marketing test lab.

At first encounter, I could tell it was going to be more than your standard blade solution – this is both good and potentially very good. I found the power and flexibility of the UCS Manager approach for controlling the gear very useful for the testing, benchmarking and QA activities we perform on a regular basis against the Nimble Storage iSCSI platform.

The recent UCS experience also coincided with Nimble Storage’s forays into the VDI solution space. Here the combination of the UCS compute/network solution and Nimble Storage’s hybrid (SSD/HDD) storage platform were a great fit.  Our initial results of this combination can be reviewed here: http://info.nimblestorage.com/cisco-vmware-nimblestorage-solutions.html

Since getting started last summer with our first UCS B-series chassis and the first two test blades, we have grown the test lab to two full chassis filled with Cisco’s latest gear. Tie that compute and networking horsepower to a couple of Nimble Storage CS400 series arrays and you have some interesting testing grounds for virtualization, application testing, VDI, benchmarking – you name it.

If you’re in London for Cisco Live, please stop by our stand (#E81) – I’ll be sharing a peek at our test lab. We’ll also be gathering ideas for our lab infrastructure for the upcoming year. We are already looking at the C-Series servers, which are a good fit for the lower mid-market or isolated environment focus.

See you at Cisco Live Europe!

If you are going to be at VMworld, be sure to experience the impressive Nimble Storage experience first hand… Yes, we’ll have a bunch of gear in the booth and remotely connected for you to play with.

Swing by the Nimble booth by to see:

• One thousand end-user desktops being served from a single 3U CS200 Series system (that’s right 1,000 users in a 3U storage system).
• The simplicity of managing Nimble Storage from VMware vCenter to instantaneously provision, clone and protect storage and VMs.
• Months worth of instant and efficient backups of VMs and app data taken without breaking the bank.
• Scale-out storage clusters and multi-pathing for VMware (using the PSP plugin)

And be sure to pick up a handy dandy eco-friendly Nimble Storage tote bag, sign up for our daily prizes or schedule a sit down with our execs and experts, who would be happy to talk to you on how to make the move to a virtual data center built on Nimble Storage.

Be sure to also check out our partner CommVault’s booth #1531  and ask them about the recently released integration with Nimble Storage through their IntelliSnap Connect Program.

It also turns out that it has been just over 2 years since we first publicly launched our company, and I wanted to take this opportunity to look back and look ahead.

Looking back on our founding premise

We were founded in 2008 on the premise of three core beliefs.  First, we believed that flash changes everything in storage – more so than any other technology over the last decade.  Further, while most existing companies were working to leverage flash SSDs to target high performance applications, we believed that a much larger opportunity existed in disrupting mainstream modular storage. While it is easier to design a system that leverages flash as a standalone tier or in an all-flash array, designing an intelligent hybrid storage systems that can flexibly combine the complementary characteristics of flash SSDs and HDDs addresses a much broader set of workloads and cost-points.

Our second core belief was that the traditional approach to data protection, which relied on making separate copies of data on to backup systems, was ready for disruption.  While de-duplication made the backup storage system more cost effective, it did not eliminate the transfer time and cost inefficiencies of moving data over a network for every backup and recovery operation.  We believed that a system that could accommodate thousands of space-efficient and performance-efficient snapshots, coupled with WAN-optimized replication, could dramatically lower backup and recovery times and also minimize the amount of data at risk in the event of an outage.

Our third core belief was that core innovation in storage stems from rethinking data layout and the underlying architecture of the storage system.  When we considered how Data Domain designed an entire file-system that was optimized around de-duplication or how Isilon was designed ground-up for scale-out NAS or several similar examples, we came to believe that the ideal hybrid storage system would require rethinking the architecture and data layout from the ground-up.

We translated these core beliefs into an architecture that we brought to bear nearly two years ago.  Our internal mission as an organization is “To deliver the world’s most efficient data storage solutions to enterprises”.  It reflects the fact that flash is a means to the end; that we are targeting a broad range of mainstream Enterprise applications; that we are simultaneously optimizing for 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.

Two years of living the promise

In the two years that we have been deploying our products, our promise to customers is that we accelerate their applications by delivering 4-5 times better performance and 2-5 times more useable capacity than similarly priced systems; that we help them protect their data better through a combination of thousands of integrated backups and WAN-optimized replication; and that we empower their IT teams by being dramatically simpler to deploy and manage and most importantly to support on a day-to-day basis.

The success with which we have lived this promise is reflected in the rapid and accelerating growth that we have seen in the last two years.  We now have over a 1000 deployments, and our pace of customer adoption has been accelerating as we added over 175 new customers in our most recent quarter alone.  Besides our product value proposition, one of the keys to our customer success has been the investment we made in remote support automation that allows us to predict faults and proactively ensure that our customer systems are running well.  We are proud of the customer community that we have built and are acutely aware of the responsibility we have to nurture this community.

Our partner eco-system has strengthened every quarter with a large base of channel partners, and deep relationships with an increasing number of alliance partners.  We have both deepened our relationship with partners such as VMware, Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix and CommVault as well as broadened our base of partnerships with many more alliance partners that are critical to our success.

Our scope of operations is increasingly becoming global as we have expanded substantially in Europe and have just recently established a presence in Australia.  At the same time, our employee base has grown substantially from ~40 people in January 2011 to nearly 240 people today.  More importantly, we have continued to maintain a high bar on talent as well as on the principle of recruiting people that are pleasant to work with!

We have set a scorching pace over the last two years that has been very gratifying – we have a lot to be proud of, and a lot to be grateful for.

Scale to fit: a giant leap forward

I believe that the solution we are launching today is a giant leap forward in how customers are able to scale their storage infrastructure, and a significant new differentiator for Nimble Storage.

Traditional scale-up systems and more modern scale-out systems are rooted in an era where storage capacity and storage performance have had to be tethered together.  Scale-up, the mainstream approach to scaling in the 1990s, forced you into silos when you maxed out the capabilities of a storage controller.  Scale-out approaches that were brought to bear in the last decade allowed you to start with a small footprint and scale over time but each incremental scaling step came in the form of an additional node that was relatively more expensive and delivered performance and capacity and bandwidth even if you only needed to scale one of those dimensions.

What we are bringing to market today is the ability to scale any dimension, and only that dimension at the lowest possible cost, without ever disrupting applications.  You can start with a Nimble array – if you want more performance, you can pull out the old controller and put in a new controller and gain higher performance from the same storage shelf.  If you want more of your data to be on SSDs, you can replace a lower capacity SSD with a higher capacity SSD.  If you need more storage capacity, you can add disk shelves.  If you need to scale all aspects, you can add another Nimble array and scale-out across multiple arrays.  You can do any or all of these steps – without ever disrupting any application.  We have combined the ability to scale-up performance, scale capacity and scale-out across multiple nodes in our scale-to-fit architecture, in a manner that no other system is able to do.

With the scale-to-fit architecture, we are also introducing a new line of platforms – our CS400 series that delivers even higher performance for extremely demanding workloads, supporting hundreds of virtual machines or thousands of VDI users on a single 3U array.

Explore what we can do for you

We truly believe that storage infrastructure is going through the most significant transformation in over a decade. A large number of customers and partners have increasingly embraced us as we work to deliver on our promise of bringing dramatic efficiencies to our customers’ storage infrastructure.

Please explore the Nimble Storage web site or call us – we would love to engage further and jointly explore how we can make your storage infrastructure more efficient and future-proof your investment.

Nimble Storage’s ground-up approach efficiently leverages flash and disk, and through a combination of dynamic caching and guaranteed random write sequentialization, is able to effectively address the rapidly fluctuating demands of virtual desktops, in addition to other business-critical workloads. Inline compression and other storage reduction techniques such as clones and efficient snapshots eliminate the compromise between performance and capacity.

As part of simplifying the end user experience around VDI deployments, Nimble has been partnering extensively with VMware to put together reference-able blueprints and best practices. Nimble’s certification through the VMware Rapid Desktop Program was the first step in this process.

As part of this continuing relationship, Nimble is proud to announce that our hybrid storage arrays are supported in the reference architectures VMware has developed to support Mobile Secure Devices.

In a nutshell, Nimble Storage delivers affordable, flash-enabled performance for optimal mobile user experience. Snapshot-based backups and WAN-efficient replication provide simplified protection. Comprehensive life cycle oriented management minimizes operational overhead.

Read more about the joint value VMware and Nimble bring for Bring Your Own Desktop (BYOD) environments.

Check out the VMware MSD Bootcamp video to get the scoop on best practices and guidelines around MSD deployment.

Read about how EU Services deployed Nimble Storage and gained the performance and responsiveness their end users toting BYOD devices demanded.

Finally, please stay tuned for more valuable tools and initiatives from the VMware-Nimble partnership in the months to come!

Thanks to our customers, partners and our people

We ended the year with orders that were almost twice what we thought was feasible in December 2010.  The value of our orders booked in our recently concluded 4^th quarter (Nov’11 – Jan’12) was almost five times larger than in Q4 of our previous fiscal year, and we shipped 200 systems and added over a hundred new customers in Q4 alone – a substantial achievement within 5 quarters of shipping products.  Very significant portions of our wins have been accomplished without extensive pilots and proof of concept deployments, because of the following drivers:

• Customers acting as our advocates – thank you!!  We have quickly managed to build a base of loyal customers that are willing to act as references and speak about their experiences in deploying our systems.  We at Nimble are very grateful for this and recognize that we need to continue to earn this loyalty
• Partners have embraced our solutions – thank you!! Channel partners are critical to our success, since our business model is to drive all our business through channel partners.  Our partner base has ramped faster than we anticipated, with over 130 channel partners in a short time-span.  More significantly, our partners have adopted our solutions more thoroughly than we could have hoped for – we are often positioned as one the top 2-3 storage solutions that they recommend to their customers, alongside the traditional large, incumbent vendors.

We have laid a strong organizational foundation – thanks to our employees!! Startups exist because they have a vision of being able to do things better than much larger companies despite capital constraints, resource constraints, inadequate infrastructure, perceptions of being higher risk and so on.  Employees in the early years need to have a maniacal belief to overcome the constraints and they play a critical role in helping to scale the organization.  We have done very well in this regard – we were 38 people a year ago, and have grown to over 4 times that size in a year!! We have a very rigid internal principle in that we want a high bar on talent but also an equally high bar on not hiring jerks!  We have been able to grow our organization without compromising on this principle.

Resounding validation of our value proposition

With over 500 deployments, competing against the largest storage companies for every win, we have a resounding validation of the value we bring to our customers.

• Unparalleled performance and capacity efficiency for Enterprise applications.  A significant majority of our deployments are in virtual environments running mainstream Enterprise applications – database applications, Exchange, File services, SharePoint, VDI being among the most common – and a key factor has been that our customers see 4-5 times more performance and 2-3 times more usable capacity for the same spend!
• Dramatically superior business continuity.  Our customers maintain hundreds of online backups on our arrays alongside their primary application data, and these backups are almost instantaneous to create and to recover from.  Our replication attach rate is over 70% – much higher than industry norms, but understandable given the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of our solution.  Taken together, converged primary and backup data, coupled with WAN efficient replication, has dramatically improved our customers’ ability to maintain business continuity.
• Pain-free operations. We get high marks from our customers in the areas of simplicity in initial setup and ongoing administration, highly automated proactive support, simplicity in pricing and licensing, and in the extent of our integration into application environments.

We are just getting started

We have a lot to do as we look at the year ahead.  We believe that we can continue to set a scorching pace in terms of top-line growth, customer acquisition, geographic expansion and in broadening and deepening our channel partner base.  We also have an ambitious agenda for the innovation that we will bring to bear, with some industry-leading functionality that will significantly broaden our platform over the course of the year.  Even as we scale rapidly and expand the scope of our operations, we will drive only as fast as we can while maintaining our hiring standards, how well we maintain our culture, and how effectively we continue to foster customer and partner loyalty.

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