Nimble Storage Reaches 7,500 Customers Worldwide

More than 7,500 customers have deployed the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform, an increase of more than 2,500 customers in the last 12 months.

This customer adoption rate is in contrast to the customer growth rates of many next generation portfolio storage competitors that introduced products in a similar time-frame to leverage the disruptive impact of flash. Nimble attributes this growth to its ability to develop and deliver technology with a commitment to superior customer support.

“We designed the Adaptive Flash platform with the ultimate goal of addressing the entire spectrum of applications and workloads across the enterprise. Our ability to stand behind our word and deliver industry-leading technology has driven a high level of customer loyalty across our customer base of mid-market businesses, global enterprises and cloud service providers,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble Storage. “In collaboration with our channel partner ecosystem and in alignment with our technology alliance partners, we’ve been able to acquire more than 7,500 customers in just under six years of shipping our first flash storage products.“

The Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform, consisting of the flash-optimized CASL file system and InfoSight cloud-based management software, offers the broadest approach to leveraging flash storage in the modern data center.

The platform has been deployed by enterprises that include: Westfield Shopping Centers, Amberg Technologies AG, Villanova, Channellock, Inc., DAA, Dreamscape, Phillips Capital, INSEAD, Seek, Splio, and Kimball International, Inc. Additionally, Nimble continues to support cloud service providers developing services platforms with Nimble’s platform as the underpinning storage infrastructure. Service provider customers include: NTT SmartConnect Corporation, phoenixNAP, LLC, Clearview International, LLC, Virtacore Systems, Inc., iland Internet Solutions Corporation, ServerCentral, LivePerson, Inc., and Zanox.

Nimble continues to underscore its commitment to customer support by leveraging its data analytics capabilities to deliver measured availability across its installed base of storage arrays of 99.9997%. Key differentiators span the high levels of resiliency and availability the adaptive flash platform provides, the level of visibility the company has into its customers’ environments with InfoSight, and the consequent high level of proactive support that is delivered to end users. Over 90% of support cases are identified and opened by InfoSight. And over 80% of support cases initiated by InfoSight are closed automatically without customer intervention.

Path to 7,500 Customers
The path to acquiring 7,500 customers has come over the past six years with the company exiting fiscal year 2013 with 1,095 customers, which more than doubled exiting fiscal year 2014 to 2,645 customers. International expansion fueled growth in fiscal year 2015 to 4,979 customers and fiscal year 2016 to 7,500 customers. International customer growth doubled during fiscal year 2015 from 816 to 1,500 customers exiting fiscal year 2016 representing 20% of the company’s customer base.

Industry Recognition: Gartner Magic Quadrant for General Purpose Disk Arrays
Nimble advanced to the leaders quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays¹. The company had been recognized for three consecutive years in the same report.

Industry Recognition: Gartner Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, mid-range Storage Arrays
According to Gartner: “The ability to build agile, manageable and cost-effective storage infrastructures will depend on the creation of methodologies that stack-rank vendors, storage arrays and bids in their environments. Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for General Purpose Arrays² quantifies eight critical measures of product attractiveness across six mid-range storage array use cases.” In this report, the Nimble Storage CS-Series arrays received a product score of 3.93 out of 5 in the Overall Use Case category ranking the solution 3rd amongst seventeen vendor products. View the Critical Capabilities for General Purpose Arrays report.

Customers Continue to Praise Nimble Storage for Ease of Use, Performance and Support
“We originally selected the Nimble array to support a VDI project and when we compared the performance to our previous storage we immediately knew it was time for us to go full scale with our Nimble deployment. Due to Nimble’s compression capabilities we’re able to reduce traffic in between sites and bring workloads back online within 30 minutes, which is a process that previously took 14 hours. We now run our corporate VDI and all production data including SQL and MongoDB on the Nimble platform. In addition, we’ve been able to consolidate from disparate solutions to support our DR initiative on a single storage platform. Ease of use, increased performance, and industry leading support – that’s been our experience with Nimble,” said Brian Jones, IT operations, Onvia, Inc. delivering the essential bid, award, agency, vendor and budget data companies need to succeed in the government contracting market.

“We took a lot of time to decide on a new storage system and we tested many providers. This thorough evaluation process is how we became aware of Nimble Storage. The technology-driven approach and support, which is available around the clock, are key reasons we’ve selected Nimble as our storage platform. The simplified operations and scalability assure us that we don’t need to worry about our storage requirements in the near future. We searched for a solution that facilitates our work and meets our requirements, and we have found one. Problem solved,” said Hendrick Nehnes, head of IT, Zanox, the performance marketing network in Europe.

“The Nimble storage platform has given us a 60% performance increase for one of our most critical applications which has created a more efficient product lifecycle management process, ultimately impacting Rip Curl’s bottom line. Since we implemented Nimble, the company has gone above-and-beyond to ensure our infrastructure remains highly available through proactive customer support preempt issues. We are thrilled that we implemented an enterprise platform that is exceeding the expectations of our business,” said Leo Magdaleno, IT business analyst, Rip Curl USA, which designs, produces, and distributes a variety of products in more than 60 countries worldwide for surfers and boardsport enthusiasts.

“From day one the Nimble platform was able to host 1PB of our data with the ability to scale to a multi petabyte range. InfoSight allows us to monitor not only the health status of our Nimble arrays, but also the capacity trending components. The ability to look into each one of our arrays individually and proactively manage each array’s capacity is critical to maintaining application service levels. We are now able to start taking a look at how we plan and budget for the future. InfoSight puts that data at our fingertips,” said William Bell, VP of products, phoenixNAP.

“Management and maintenance tracking functionality is comprehensive with the InfoSight portal. The ability to receive automated alerting in order to help our team proactively administer our storage platform has been invaluable. It has undoubtedly streamlined our maintenance and troubleshooting processes and in turn, has enhanced our ability to provide preeminent service to customers with our hosted storage offering,” said TJ Karklins, Clearview International LLC CEO

¹ Gartner Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays, written by Stanley Zaffos, Roger W. Cox, Valdis Filks, and Santhosh Rao October 21, 2015.
² Gartner Critical Capabilities for General Purpose, Midrange Storage Arrays, written by Stanley Zaffos, Valdis Filks, Santhosh Rao, Roger W. Cox, October 21, 2015.