Start-Up’s Profile: Nimble Storage

Company
Nimble Storage, Inc.

Headquarters
San Jose, CA

Born in
2008

Financial Funding
$17 million by Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. At the board we note the presence of Kirk Bowman, most recently executive VP of WW field operations at Dell/EqualLogic, and Suresh Vasudevan, president and CEO of Omneon and previously NetApp’s senior executive for nearly a decade.

Main executives

• Varun Mehta, CEO and co-founder, was most recently VP engineering at PeakStream, a start-up acquired by Google. Prior to that, he had the same position for Data Domain, sold to EMC. He spent more than six years at NetApp, which he joined as its eleventh employee. He also held senior management positions at FastForward Networks, Panasas, and Sun.
• Umesh Maheshwari, CTO and co-founder, was previously technical director at Data Domain, and before that at Zambeel and InterTrust.
• Dan Leary, VP marketing, was formerly VP marketing at ConSentry Networks and VP of product management at Peribit Networks, purchased by Juniper Networks in 2005 for $337 million, before stints at netVmg, Lucent Technologies and Bay Networks.
• Mike Muñoz, VP sales, served as regional VP of sales for Data Domain, and formerly worked at Z-Force, BlueArc, NetApp and Ungermann-Bass Networks.

Number of employees
35

Technology
Nimble calls it ‘converged iSCSI storage’, based on its patent-pending architecture, Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout or CASL, which enables inline compression, data optimization leveraging flash memory (Intel MLC) and low-cost high-capacity SATA disks, instant de-duped backups and WAN replication – all in a single device, the CS-CS-Series iSCSI array. Capabilities also include dual-parity RAID, thin provisioning, snapshots, in­stant restore, cloning, data protection policies, comprehensive checksums, proactive data scrubbing, auto-support (email home), hardware monitoring, and scale-out ready. Each configuration offers redundant, hot-swappable controllers, power supplies, fans and drives and comprehensive resiliency capabilities. Four GbE ports are integrated. The CS-Series is optimized for interoperability with Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, VMware and Hyper-V environments.

  
Cache Accelerated Sequen­tial Layout (CASL) architecture

Products

• CS220: 3U, 9TB of primary storage (640GB on flash) + 108TB backup
• CS240: 3U, 18TB of primary storage (1.3TB on flash) + 216TB backup

Prices
Pricing starts at $50,000 for CS220 (under $3 per usable GB for primary storage and $0.25 per GB for backup) and at $100,000 for CS240.

Roadmap
General availability projected to be in August

Customers
Small and medium sized enterprises

Competitors
Include Dell/EqualLogic, GreenBytes, HP and NetApp