Nimble Storage in Europe

Nimble Storage announced its launch into the European market with the appointment of Philip Turner to the position of EMEA sales director and the recruitment of a number of system engineers and support technicians.

 Philip Turner was Data Domain’s Regional Director for UK and Ireland with over 15 years’ experience in the storage market. Prior to joining Data Domain in 2007, he served as EMEA Director for Acopia Networks. He was also one of the first European employees at NetApp, where he held the position of District Manager for the public sector and enterprise accounts. He has also held positions at IronPort Systems and CA.

At the same time the company has started partnering with a number of channel organisations to accelerate adoption of its technology.

Nimble’s approach converges storage, backup, and disaster recovery into a single solution. Its Cache Accelerated Sequen-tial Layout architecture is designed from the ground up to leverage flash memory in combination with capacity, low-RPM drives to provide performance and capacity at a low cost. In addition, WAN-efficient replication enables disaster recovery to a remote Nimble array, giving enterprises of almost any size a business continuity solution.

Some customers share their thoughts about Nimble’s technology: "Nimble blew away the competition. At the outset we achieved approximately 15 times the performance of our previous systems, and substantially greater performance than other systems we had considered. Now we’re getting data compression of 40 percent across the board. That’s phenomenal," said Eric Myers, Network Engineer, San Diego County Convention Center. Ethan Erchinger, VP of operations at Plaxo is just as satisfied: "Performance is absolutely critical, and that’s all about getting the highest achievable IOPS for the dollar. The IOPS we’re achieving with the Nimble array has proven game-changing for our development team."

Nimble’s CS-Series arrays give organisations the functionality, performance, and capacity of three primary storage and one backup devices, all in a 3U solution. Benefits realised through the deployment of the product include primary storage performance for demanding applications like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), instant backups and restores, and over 60% in Capex reduction.

Nimble’s team and solution have driven early success: in the first year of shipping, the company gained over 150 customers in the high tech, architecture, financial services, legal, healthcare, and public sector markets, and its revenue ramp exceeds the most successful storage start-ups of the past decade during a similar period. In July, Nimble raised $25 million in an oversubscribed Series D round of funding, capping a total investment of $58 million over the life of the company.

The CS-Series arrays are built on Nimble’s CASL architecture which stores all data as variable-size blocks, enabling real-time 2-4x data com-pression with no added latency. Randomly written data is coalesced into full-stripe writes for consistent performance. In addition, CASL keeps a copy of active hot data in flash memory for fast reads, while all data, included an extended set of snapshots, is stored in capacity disk.

"During my years at Data Domain I learnt that true innovation tends to come from new players as they are not tied to existing technologies and can start from a blank canvas. I joined Nimble Storage because it has a fresh, forward-thinking approach to the storage market, one that is unique and that meets a number of needs end users are trying to meet," said Philip Turner, EMEA sales director at Nimble Storage.