Some organizations hire wave-making “superstars” without considering their effect on a business’ team atmosphere. Nimble Storage is not that type of organization, said CEO Suresh Vasudevan, when he stopped by theCUBE during the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Platform launch event. Their collaborative, “no jerks” company culture has helped Nimble Storage continue to provide innovative product offerings in a tumultuous storage market.

Responding to host John Furrier’s question about whether massive changes in the storage market confuse customers, Vasudevan spoke to the huge variety of choices with which customers are now faced. He cautioned, though, that while there seem to be a plethora of startups in the storage market– “forty, fifty startups in just the last three or four years–” their ability to stay in business varies drastically: “of the fifty, only five will survive.”

Amidst the rapid change, Vasudevan commented, business priorities also confused customers:

“It was growth at all costs.” Recently though, Vasudevan explained that he has been seeing the market try to find a way to deliver “hyper growth” without sacrificing “operating leverage” or “a sustainable business model.” He credits part of Nimble Storage’s current success to the fact that they’ve always “held dear” all three of the business concepts.

Nimble Storage’s Adaptive Flash Platform

June 11th marked the product launch of Nimble Storage’s newest product offering, an Adaptive Flash Storage Platform. This new platform’s main strength, Vasudevan said, is it’s ability to blend “performance and capacity.” “The architecture,” he said, “is built to flexibly deliver” what the application needs to perform the customer’s workloads most efficiently. He described the product as a “high-end version” of their platform that offers “performance that rivals mainstream flash arrays,” so clients can “scale out faster.” It’s also “extremely cost-effective for storage capacity.” Indeed, Vasudevan said, the “breadth of the platform” allows it to “address any workload.” It offers the “performance of all flash drives with the price of hybrid.”

• Why Compression rather than Deduplication?

Responding to host Stu Miniman’s question about why Nimble Storage decided against using deduplication, Vasudevan explained why he thinks compression and provision are adequate:

1. “The new system doesn’t address object storage” and so, “with 10 snapshots we’re solving the same problem that deduplicated backups do.”

2. “In the case of server farms, typically you can use zero-copy cloning to deliver the benefits that dedupe does.”

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The typical benefit that dedupe delivers, says Vasudevan, is about 20-35 percent. He doesn’t consider that benefit high enough to “go after dedupe specifically because [Nimble Storage] systems deliver very high performance using low-cost drives.”

That was the “underpinning” Vasudevan says his company wrestled with: “given that we were already using low-cost drives, we would have to spend a lot on memory to maintain the dedupe hash tables and the savings are going to be 20-30 percent so they don’t cost-justify.”

• With more Flash, dedupe is inevitable

Vasudevan was sure to call out, though, that “as you start to evolve toward systems that have very high Flash content,” deduplication becomes necessary. It’s a question of cost: “If you’re going to spend more on memory to facilitate deduplication, more one CPU — at what point does the underlying media-cost reduction justify that extra expense?”

Where cloud fits in to the Nimble Storage picture

Responding to Miniman’s question about cloud, Vasudevan described cloud service providers as segment whose rapid expansion helps to drive Nimble Storage’s own growth. Particularly, those companies that function, as he says, by saying: “here’s a virtual machine for rent, come run your application.” But, Vasudevan mentioned, “there is a segment of the cloud service provider market — companies like AWS, Google, and Azure — that are not necessarily deploying that infrastructure.” Therefore, he says, those companies are “taking away from data that a customer would otherwise place on a storage system.”

Most of the data going to to public clouds, says Vasudevan, is “virtually consistent data, so archives, backups. It’s not necessarily appropriate for transactional data.” In transactional data environments, “you still need an engineered storage system,” like the one Nimble Storage offers. Over time, though, Vasudevan said that “backups should live in a public cloud.” It is a direction Nimble Storage will pursue “at the right time.” It makes sense, he says, “as a way we would solve the back up challenge. We would still want to leverage the way we approach snapshots, but perhaps think of the cloud as an infrastructure that enables us to use it as well.”

Storage architectures have to change”

In reply to Furrier’s request to share how he “boils down” the storage situation for customers, Vasudevan said, “I have never believed more that storage architectures have to change.” Moving to a “Flash optimized platform is radically going to change the economics of [customers’] storage” if they have a data center with massive amounts data. It may be in “the cost of delivering capacity, or the cost of delivering performance, or the ease of data management.” As a business, Vasudevan explained,”if you’re not contemplating your options, you’re sacrificing some degree of efficiency.” Changes to storage infrastructure are just a mater of time, and Vasudevan believes that Nimble Storage has built “the broadest Flash platform, and that’s what’s driving the rapid customer acquisition. ”

• Two main reasons storage growth is slowing

Miniman touched on Nimble Storage’s “enviable position,” asking Vasudevan to speak to storage broadly, wondering whether the company can maintain its growth even though storage recently experienced what “IDC called the worst quarter […] in many years.” While customer budgets are certainly shrinking, Vasudevan explained, there are two even more reasons storage growth is slowing:

1. Reduced over-provisioning for storage

“For years,” Vesudevan said, “we’ve been used to over-provisioning storage to deliver performance that applications need.” By using Flash, he says, companies can spend less on storage to meet their same performance requirements.

2. Eventually consistent customer data

Vasudevan also explained that object-storage systems, “whether on-premises or in Amazon S3, are taking away from data that would otherwise have done in Isilon or NetApp or others.” The movement away from “very large NAS systems,” Vasudevan believes, is also “causing a shrinkage in revenue.”

• Why this inflection point is so exciting

To conclude the interview, Furrier asked Vasudevan to share why he considers the current inflection point in the technology industry is so important. Vasudevan explained that “fundamental enabling catalysts” are rewriting rules across the board, like “how you build data bases,” “how you solve security,” and “how you address storage.” Vasudevan attributed these catalysts to cloud, Flash, and data analytics, which allow companies to re-imagine the way they handle their business needs.