As a player in the flash market since its inception, and in an attempt to meet customer needs, Nimble has developed several innovative applications. Product options include the company’s adaptive flash array storage solution, as well as InfoSight, the program that helps Nimble customers manage their data, keeping it secure until they need to access it.

TheCUBE covered the keynote address by Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage, at the Nimble Adaptive Flash Launch, where the company announced the release of its adaptive flash architecture.

The key to Nimble’s business

Vasudevan began his keynote address by discussing some of the core aspects of Nimble’s business. He revealed that one of the main reasons behind the rapid adoption of adaptive flash and InfoSight was the horizontal nature of the company. The very fact that it chose not to focus on one specific application allows them to focus on providing a variety of services across a broad pattern of applications.

“Another aspect that underscores the strength of the platform that we’ve brought to bear, the market reduction we’re seeing, is the nature of the alliance relationships we’ve built,” Vasudevan said. “It is the very nature of Nimble’s working relationships with other companies, such as Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware, that has allowed it to develop its products to best fit the needs of customers and has driven the strong market adoption of Nimble’s products.”

Building an evolving storage solution

Vasudevan also discussed the disruptive nature of flash. “I started off by saying that flash is disruptive. And flash is indeed disruptive,” he said. “This is now a fact that’s acknowledged by everyone in our industry. Competitors, vendors, customers, everybody, believes flash is disruptive.”

As such, companies can choose how they leverage that disruption. The first involves building flash-only arrays built to work with high-performance applications. The second involves building a tiered system that uses both disk and flash, absorbing all incoming data to the flash system and then in the background copying it to disk.

The best application, according to Vasudevan, is to leverage the strengths of both while avoiding any weaknesses. By developing a flexible architecture that utilizes both flash and disk, the platform evolves with new innovations and the needs of the customer. In this way, customers who want high performance have access to that capability, while those customers who seek more value for their dollars can utilize that capability as well.

See the entire keynote presentation below.