Nimble CEO: When it comes to all-flash stars, there can be only... six Nimble Storage CEO Suresh Vasudevan told an investor conference he expects six all-flash array (AFA) suppliers to dominate the business, with Dell/EMC, HP and IBM being three of them. Vasudevan was talking at an analysts’ meeting, presenting multiple financial facets of his post-IPO company. Attendee Stifel MD Aaron Rakers …
HDS - - HAF? Half of what? Acquire a marketing department.
Kaminario - Wut? Terminario
NetApp - Stop the marketing snow jobs
Pure Storage - Where's the scale out? I do admire Vaughn's silky hair though, I must admit
SanDisk (Intelliflash JBOF with third-party SW) being bought by WDC - Neeeext
Solidfire - Be acquired to Die trying
Tegile - Ex-Cisco execs? Storage? As good a match as bacon and avocado.
Tintri - You better grow up and learn how to block
Violin Memory - Stick a fork. No. Stick two forks.
I realize this has nothing to do with with your post other than the complete nonsense about food choices.
Bacon and avocado go great together. Cisco execs and storage? No idea, but you mentioned food and and it's around time to eat here.
Here are just three awesome pairings:
* Guacamole bacon hamburgers
* Avocado halves filled with bacon and eggs
* Avocado slices on a bacon-turkey club sandwich
And all of those go well with a pint!
but I can't for the life of me see a reason Nimble would be amongst the 6 vendors. NetApp have their integration and software stack to save them, Violin possibly have enough good IP to save them, Pure were early and cheap (although now far more pricey than NetApp AFF) but Nimble have neither the software integration, API, hardware IP nor brand to be in the club unless they have something much more clever up their sleeve and I can't imagine what that might be. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Nimble, just if I were going to pick 6 to go forward they would not be in the running.
This is a developing market which by the end of this year, it'll be somewhere around 2.4bln. Everybody's trying to position themselves. Way too early to tell.
If you want SW integration then you need to look at established architectures like ONTAP because none of these newer players have deep hooks but what these newer guys do have is significant simplicity, ease of use, less complexity. For a lot of people these days, these beat "better". Remember, there's NO free lunch. There are always tradeoffs to be made.
What's important to you maybe not be important for someone else
Pretty rich for a guy who is THE LAST IN THE INDUSTRY to bring a product to market -- and an undifferentiated one at that -- to imply that he will be among the leaders to emerge post some future consolidation.
If you miss your number by like what, 10%? -- and your stock falls by 50% -- what does that mean? What does that really mean about a company, a product line, an architecture? I think it means grossly insufficient product differentiation. It is a prediction that you will be a loser in the coming consolidation, not a winner. So to go out and declare yourself a winner -- in advance -- when the market is telling you 100% the opposite -- well, that just takes the cake!
Pretty Rich seems to know a lot about the yet to be announced Nimble AFA and seems very upset. First is not always a good place to be - Violin is a good example, they tried, but no cigar. Did Prettty Rich have money on that dead horse. There are a host of 'emergent' storage companies. CM mentions Kaminario, Pure, SanDisk, SolidFire, Tegile, Tintri and Violin. I know people at four of these and those four at least have a niche they are chasing, some interesting ideas and some decent people. After a lot of dull years storage is interesting again. I don't know what Nimble has in terms of an all flash play but rather than chase a niche they have gone for a more general approach. This has got them nearly 7,000 customers, who seem to love what they do (more than the 7 listed emergent players combined). It will be very interesting to see what Nimble comes out with, perhaps the game is just beginning (except for Violin, who IMO are dead).
Haha, no, I don't have any money on Violin (!).
You're not arguing with me about Nimble's prospects, you're arguing with the market. For their part I wish Nimble well. But I don't know why Suresh is opening his mouth at this juncture.
I do agree, Storage is interesting again.
I'm guessing Suresh is making noise ahead of being able to announce whatever Nimble have under wraps. The SEC make some loops Execs have to jump through and you can almost see him navigating that course. The market is next to useless as a short term indicator. Cisco and NetApp both had bigger price crashes than Nimble in their history, but it is does put some short term pressure on them. IMO The reason storage is interesting again is we are at one of those tipping points that come normally less than once a generation. The top five vendors have lost more market share in the last 18 months than the previous decade and seem mostly powerless to arrest their slide. This makes the market nervous but no wiser. The movements at the moment are largely the average guesses of people with money but only limited understanding. Limited for some because they don't know much but mostly because there are just so many unknowns at the moment. I have to argue every day with the market (or at least mostly ignore stock prices) as otherwise I'd be flip-flopping all over the place.
On the separate question of why investors would want to listen to the CEO of a company whose price had just dropped 50% - Doh! - That is so 101. What he has to say becomes more important as the market is never a steady state and investment opportunities exist around such large movements - whether to buy/sell/hold not just Nimble but wide stocks will be influenced by what Nimble says and does.
To the AC who lost on Violin you have may sympathy, I held my Dell stock far too long.
This post has been deleted by its author
The amusing thing in all of these transitions for somebody who has worked in SV since the 1980s is many many many of the same players keep showing up in all of these stories and companies. Eventually I suppose we'll have a winner technology, but by and large I see many of the same mistakes being made from a technical point of view, by the same people, with often the same funders.
As I've had hands on with pretty much every one of these vendors products i'd like to toss in a couple of thoughts.
1. Dell / EMC - The XtremIO is garbage... If you love watching your tier 1 array fail spectacularly... here you go. The only reason this has a market presence at all is the EMC brand. As well as their sales force was getting double commissions pushing it. So instead of refreshing VNXs or Vmax, guess what their sales force shoved down the throat of everyone of their existing customers?
2. HP - 3par 7450 and 8450 ... its a damn 3par with only flash drives and more memory... that is it. It couldn't possibly be a lazier entry into the AFA market than this. Dedupe and compression are clearly after thoughts, and from the interface you'll struggle to find out how well the array is actually performing in these metrics compared to other vendors.
3. IBM - TMS feels like its the last bit of hardware that IBM actually sells outside of Power. Big blue has stifled the once awesome prospect of TMS and it's RamSan. As far as being a market leader, it hardly qualifies. Like EMC this was an install base refresh ploy to show market share.
4. Pure - Frankly I love their //m series array. Its clean (only power and fiber coming off the back), installed in 30 minutes, and the interface is easy to use and didn't require a VM or extra 1U server to run (looking at you EMC and HP). Only issue I have is with array sprawl, once you hit the capacity or the iops limit of the array you need another one, with a separate management interface. So its harder from a capacity stand point to replace VMaxs or 10000/20000 3pars with it. Though they at least have a multi-array management tool.
5. Solid Fire - It was "ok". I think the biggest annoyance is they market it as a 100 node capable, but fail to mention that is only if you use iSCSI for your block based storage. If you use fiber you are limited to 20 nodes due to the fan-in bottleneck of the 2 fiber channel nodes. Oh and they don't sell or configure the dual 10 Gb switches required to form the cluster, so you need to do quite a bit of extra networking work to get this operational.
6. Kaminario - I like the scale up or scale out design, and the interface is clean. The install though was painful...5+ hours on the first and 3+ days for the 2nd due to a DOA component they had to triage. Marketing and name recognition is next to non-existent. I really was hoping NetApp was going to buy them instead of solid-fire.
7. Violin - Clearly losing a battle in the flash industry because of their focus on block storage in a very crowded market. They would excel if they instead focused on their NAS component through the WFA... uses the same hardware just a custom Windows 2012 Server storage edition on its management blades. SMB 3.0 has some very cool features that are being under-marketed (RDMA and Multi-channel). If they would OEM the hardware and provide linux drivers for the Vimms their array would fit nicely into a HPC cluster file system (gpfs / lustre).
8. Sandisk -The infiniflash has some awesome density, just poor connectivity... 512TB and only 6 Gb SAS?
9. HDS - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... no. When is the last time anyone had a rep come by their office?
10. Tegile - They at least figured out DDR cache is still faster than sas based SSD, which the rest of the market seems to have forgotten. They fail on the fact that they are still hybrid centered, and their box is nothing more than software on a supermicro box.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
