Flash data storage is a powerful technology that is taking over the storage world. It boasts high performance and low operating costs, which makes flash attractive in the right-now world of Big Data. An up and coming player in the flash market is Nimble Storage, Inc., bringing its own unique technology to storage solutions.

For a look into the future of Nimble Storage, Stu Miniman and David Floyer, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to Varun Mehta, cofounder and VP of engineering at Nimble, during the Nimble Storage: The Power of Predictive Analytics event in San Francisco. 

Density and mobility

The talk started with an explanation for the move to 3D NAND hardware for Nimble’s technology. “You have to skate to where the puck is going,” Mehta said, and where NAND is going is toward increasing density. Nimble needs a system that can support expanding memory.

Another issue was mobility, moving data between hybrid and all-flash storage arrays. They had spent a lot of time on data management systems, Mehta said. The result was a way for hybrid and all-flash units to be part of the same cluster. This gives customers great flexibility, because they can move the workload to the type of storage that best meets its needs.

Sharing data and a roadmap

Sharing data between clusters is another concern where Nimble can offer a solution. A company can choose multiple modes in the way storage clusters, Mehta explained. For example, a volume might live on one node, or a customer could stripe a volume across clusters for performance.

“It’s almost a given in the storage business, every year you want to be bigger and faster,” Mehta said. Currently, he explained, Nimble was far and away ahead of the competition on memory capacity. As its system is bound to the CPU, any advances in CPU technology was also a boost for them. The roadmap for the future, he said, was working on new ways to make Nimble more interesting to enterprise customers.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Nimble Storage: The Power of Predictive Analytics event.

Photo by SiliconANGLE