Keynote - Nimble Storage 2016 - #DataStorage - theCUBE

What is the app data gap? | #DataStorage

by Marlene Den Bleyker | Mar 4, 2016

Nimble Storage, Inc. is a predictive flash storage solutions company based in San Jose, California, founded in early 2008. And at the company’s recent exclusive event held in San Francisco, Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage, spoke about the company’s history and its latest product announcement.

Company vision

Nimble Storage wanted to up-end the industry disruptors and be able to adapt to change. Founded with two principle technologies in mind, the company saw opportunities in offering flash storage options to lower costs and increase speed. And they also saw an advantage in leveraging the cloud to provide predictive analytics.

Since 2010, the company has amassed 7,500 customers in various industries and has become one of the newest companies (in the past 20 years) to be a part of the Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for general-purpose disk arrays.

What is the app data gap?

Vasudevan spoke about the company’s latest announcement and how it is broadening its technology. “This morning we introduced the ground-breaking innovation in the marketplace with the announcement of the industry’s first predictive, all-flash array InfoSight, a key component of the company’s predictive flash platform.”

Vasudevan explained that when there is a gap between the application and data, you are disrupting business processes. “This gap between the application and the speed of data delivery is what we refer to as the app data gap,” he explained.

Finding the app data gap

According to Vasudevan, Nimble has monitored its platform across 7,500 customers and has looked into what causes applications to be interrupted, and the answer lies at the bottom of the infrastructure stack. “We’ve found that storage that lies at the bottom of the infrastructure stack is indeed a key component,” he said. “Less than 45 percent of the problems that disrupt applications stem from issues in the storage layer.”

Citing lack of performance, software and hardware problems as the chief contributing factors, Vasudevan said, “But when you look at what disrupts applications, over half of all the problems happen in the rest of the infrastructure stack.”

Closing the gap

While Flash offers 100 times more performance and removes storage performance constraints, it is not enough. InfoSight is made up of three key components:

1. Predictive analytics

Nimble Storage monitors the health of its customers’ infrastructure by using predictive analytics to predict and prevent breakdowns. Cloud-based predictive analytic software removes the infrastructure barriers while predicting and preventing problems.

2. Unified flash fabric

The company created a single software architecture that spans its adaptive flash arrays, consolidating to a single platform. This enables acceleration of every application in the enterprise while lowering the cost of storage.

3. Timeless storage

The timeless storage feature is at the core of the product and ensures each customer’s investment is protected. InfoSight boasts nonstop availability – eight seconds of downtime per system per month across 7,500 customers, absolute performance – every app speeds up by 5 to 10 times across the enterprise and cloud-like agility – freeing up time for customers so they can spend time managing their infrastructure for the needs of the business and enhancing productivity.

Nimble Storage touts that the new product will lower the cost of storage by 33 to 66 percent when compared to either modern and old systems. Vasudevan also said that InfoSight has other benefits for the enterprise as well, including:
•Ensuring customer success while deploying products
•All-inclusive software licensing and flat support prices in years four and five
•Options for new controller upgrade; companies are not forced into a forklift upgrade after three years
•The company is offering Storage as a Service with on-demand price, or customers can use storage as a capital expenditure and only pay for storage used while scaling on demand.

Vasudevan said that InfoSight is “the industry’s first predictive, all-flash array. What we brought to bear is a system that stands out for its scalability, scaling up to 8 petabytes, in a single system, an adaptive flash array and non-stop 99.9997 availability.”

The keynote also included Nimble Storage executives: Varun Mehta, founder and vice president of engineering, unveiling InfoSight; Rod Bagg, vice president of analytics and support, speaking about the problems contributing to the data gap; and and Dan Leary, vice president of products and solutions, detailing the unified flash fabric.