Nimble
Storage has developed the first converged storage and backup solution that
significantly reduces the cost and complexity of storing, accessing, and
protecting data for enterprises. The company's CASL architecture uniquely
combines flash and high-capacity disk to support the most demanding primary
applications and reduces backup windows and restore times from hours to seconds—all
for at least 60 percent lower cost than existing solutions. Nimble Storage also
provides a simple, cost-effective disaster recovery solution that offers
business continuity and long-term data protection. Nimble Storage solutions are
available through a nationwide network of IT solution providers. For more
information visit www.nimblestorage.com.
see also:-
Nimble's SSD accelerated backup
blog
after
AFAs - what's the next box?
What were
the big SSD ideas to learn in 2016?
is remanence in
persistent memory a new security risk?
enterprise
market consolidation - beyond the mushroom cloud
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| who's who
in SSD? - Nimble Storage | |
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com,
February 2015
Nimble
Storage entered the
rackmount SSD market
in July 2010 -
with product lines which were initially
hybrid arrays.
Nimble
has never been in the Top
20 SSD Companies researched by StorageSearch.com readers. Its best rank to
date has been #33 in Q1
2016
The company's main products are still predominantly
auto-caching hybrid
storage appliances with iSCSI
and some FC SAN
connectivity - depending on the model.
In the 12 months period upto
October 31, 2014 Nimble reported revenue of $200 million.
I discussed
the need for new pricing models in the rackmount SSD market in my (July 2014)
article - Exiting
the Astrological Age of Enterprise SSD Pricing which predated Nimble's own
variant on this theme -
Storage
on Demand - which the company announced in
November 2014.
But Nimble's "Utility-based Storage on Demand Pricing Model"
offering is part of the same big idea by vendors - how to break the logjam of
indecision in user buying patterns when they are faced with complex SSD enhanced
solutions whose
cost effectiveness is difficult to model and predict in as easy a way as
past dumb storage. |
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In July 2010 -
Nimble Storage announced
the release of the Nimble
CS-Series an iSCSI compatible
SSD ASAP which has
been optimized for backup and compression performance. The model CS240 has
18TB of primary storage and 216TB backup. At launch pricing was under $3/GB
(usable) for primary storage and $0.25/GB for backup storage.
In October 2013 -
Nimble Storage filed
its
FORM
S-1 documents for an IPO.
In March 2017 -
Nimble Storage agreed to
be acquired by HP. |
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| Nimble video discusses 5
9's in 5,000 systems |
Editor:- February 21, 2015 - Nimble Storage recently
disclosed (in a sponsored
video fronted by ESG)
that its customer deployed rackmount storage systems are achieving better than
5
9's uptime - 99.999%
availability.
 This
has been attained in a field population of 5,000 arrays representing 1,750
years of system run time thanks to a combination of factors including the crowd
sourced intelligence of its
InfoSight
management system which can alert users to potential down time events so they
can take evasive action before bad things happen.
Editor's
comments:- While useful in telling us how many systems Nimble has sold it's
less useful as an indicator of availability given that the average run time
across the population is about 4 months.
It would be more impressive
if they could repeat the disclosure in a few years time and selectively extract
the up-time of systems over different run times, upto 1 year, 1 to 2 years etc.
If indeed Nimble is still in a position to do so, and if it would
still meaningful given the
consolidation
in hardware and software which lies ahead for the enterprise SSD market may
mean that vendors will be using the same hardware. | | |
thinking inside
the box
what
do enterprise SSD users want?
High Availability
enterprise SSD arrays
Enterprise
SSDs - the Survive and Thrive Guide
7 SSD types will satisfy all
future enterprise needs
what do I need to
know about any new rackmount SSD? |
. |
| "a flash-based
write buffer needs to be even more reliable than an NVRAM-based buffer, because
it is larger and the overwrite-absorption and re-sorting might make it difficult
to recover the system to a consistent state upon loss.) On the other hand, a
read cache does not ever store the only copy of any data, so it can be
constructed inexpensively without sacrificing reliability..." |
Umesh
Maheshwari, Co-Founder and CTO,
Nimble Storage in his
blog -
Write
Caching in Flash: A Dubious Distinction (January 12th, 2012)
See
also:- DIMM
wars | | |
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| Nimble
expands on scalability |
Editor:- August 6, 2012 - "Scalability"
- in SSDs and storage - means different things to different people - and this
is one of the themes discussed in my
SSD symmetries
article.
So I was curious to see what Nimble Storage meant by
the word "scale" - as it's used more than 30 times in a
recent
press
release from the company about a new range of rackmount SSD ASAPs.
A
blog by Nimble's CEO,
Suresh Vasudevan yesterday gives a more precise explanation of what
they mean - which is in effect - you can scale capacity by adding hard drives or
scale performance by adding SSDs - or do a bit of both - "without ever
disrupting applications."
Nimble's systems span a much narrower
range of performance scalability than you would see across the
enterprise environment
- so I'm not sure if scalability is the word I would have chosen to describe
what they do. |
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"Flexibility and convenient management
within a useful application footprint" is probably more accurate - but
doesn't sound so hot. | | | |
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"While NVMe over PCIe
shaves off about 10us relative to SAS, NVMf can shave off about 100us from the
roundtrip latency between two hosts relative to protocols such as iSCSI. It also
saves CPU usage from TCP/IP processing.
This can be particularly
beneficial in scale-out systems for transferring data between hosts. It does
require RDMA-capable NICs and DCB-capable switches, so it will take some time
for mass adoption." |
| Umesh Maheshwari,
founder and CTO, Nimble
Storage in his recent blog -
NVMe
and NVMs - What to Expect (December 28, 2016). | | |
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...there are additional
techniques, besides compression and deduplication, that can reduce space usage
significantly and thereby increase the effective capacity.
One
example is - Zero-block pruning the system does not store blocks that are
filled with zeroes.
This technique can be seen as an extreme case of
either compression or deduplication. Also, some systems generalize this
technique to avoid storing blocks that are filled with any repetitive byte
pattern.
|
| Umesh Maheshwari,
Co-Founder and CTO - Nimble
- in his blog -
Understanding
Storage Capacity (January 7, 2016) | | |
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| fast growing Nimble
comments on perceptions of being a hybrid storage supplier in all flash
applications |
Editor:- May 26 , 2015 -Nimble Storage (which
got its highest ranking to date in the
Top SSD Companies List
in Q1 2015) today
reported
that revenue in its recent quarter grew 53% yoy to $71 million.
In
a related
conference
call (transcript) - Suresh
Vasudevan, CEO said, among other things - "the
hybrid market we are
competing in is roughly $10 billion, growing to about $14 billion as per
IDC's estimates over the
next 3 - 4 years... the frequency with which we compete against all-flash
alternatives has increased and our win rates are indeed high... However, when we
do lose against all-flash alternatives, it's typically 2 things happening
simultaneously.
"One, the customer has a singular application
where they've taken performance challenges and the customers saying I want to
solve the needs of this particular database or this particular application. And
the customer has by and large selected all-flash arrays as the answer for that
point need and that's often where we find that we are taking perception
challenges as much as to the reality of what our platform really does."
Editor's
comments:- Another factor for hybrid companies like Nimble, Tegile etc -
when viewed from the context of some high end all flash applications - is
that much of the functionality of their tiering software is considered to be
irrelevant or simply adding to the cost and latency. This is a
segmentational
and positioning problem which isn't entirely answered by adding AFA models to
the product line.
The long term strategic question for all storage
box vendors - when seen from the perspective of
user
consolidation thinking - is to choose how they will position themselves:-
either as a strategic supplier of raw white box hardware or as an integrator or
software supplier which collaborates with someone else's standard boxes .
See also:-
Branding Strategies
in the SSD Market | | |
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| Nimble outshouts others in
hybrid storage array social media traction |
Editor:- February 18, 2015 - A social media scored ranking of these 5
companies - Avere,
Nimble,
Tegile,
Tintri and
XIO - can be seen in a
recent blog -
Hybrid
Storage Array Industry Social Landscape - by Don Jennings,
Senior VP - Lois Paul & Partners.
Among
other things Don says "not many of the storage companies in our analysis
have clear content strategies to provide information and value to their
followers. This is especially true on YouTube, where these companies are rarely
posting anything other than product-usage videos. We also dont see any of them
engaging with industry media and influencers..."
Setting aside
for the moment any reservations you might have about the validity of using
social media as a significant enough comparative measure for enterprise
companies - Don comes up with some interesting statistics for each company
about the level of its followers, tweets etc. And by those measures Nimble
comes out top of his list. ...read
the article | | |
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| the SSD IPO
saga turns to Nimble |
Editor:- October 18, 2013 - Nimble Storage has
filed its
FORM
S-1 documents for an IPO from which we learn the following things.
- Nimble has 1,750 end-customers
- Nimble had $50 million revenue in the 6 months ending July 31 - at which
time it also had 464 employees
Editor's comments:- unlike
Violin which IPOed
recently, Nimble's rackmount systems are primarily
caching hybrid arrays.
Although this is another very crowded market segment within the
enterprise SSD product
continuum - Nimble has a clear positioning message which is...
"Our
mission is to provide our customers with the industry's most efficient
storage platform."
I like that wording - because exactly a year
ago in my home page blog here on StorageSearch.com - my theme was
Efficiency as
internecine SSD competitive advantage.
PS - If you're researching
Nimble (Storage) then please be careful not to get them mixed up with Nimbus
(Data).
Nimbus's CEO told me recently he'd prefer it if I always
expanded "Nimbus" to "Nimbus Data" - so that
people don't get Nimbus confused with Nimble.
This SSD malapropism
isn't something which I had considered before.
I replied that in the
unlikely event that serious customers (as opposed to casual readers) ever did
get confused - the solution would be for one of the companies involved to
change their name.
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