The 3PAR and All-Flash FAS arrays are sort of equivalent. Looking at this from a NetApp point of view then, NetApp has three all-flash arrays: E‑Series, SolidFire and All‑Flash FAS. The InfoSight offering will be strong competition to any Dell EMC equivalent and Dell EMC has nothing like Nimble Cloud Volumes, but it could, if it wished, develop them.ĭell EMC will be reassured that its decision that size matters as an IT supplier is being vindicated by HPE, swelling itself up with SimpliVity and Nimble. It will see HPE as a stronger but not yet equal competitor in the basic all-flash array market. Effect on competitionĭell EMC, with its all-flash XtremIO, VMAX and Unity, and coming all-flash Isilon, will now face an HPE punting 3PAR against VMAX and high-end XtremIO and maybe Unity and Nimble against Unity and XtremIO. It’s chosen to buy Nimble for a billion bucks and get itself technology for these three areas faster.

Nimble’s Cloud Volumes, which have data stored in the public cloud near Amazon and Azure data centers to support cloud compute, and offer data portability between AWS and Azure.īut HPE could shrink its 3PAR line to go down-market, build out its own analytics and enter the public cloud storage market itself.

It says it will bring this to its other storage products and that should be a feature its customers will value highly.

The highly regarded InfoSight cloud-based Nimble array monitoring and predictive analytics package.

An all-flash and hybrid flash/disk array line that slots in between its 3PAR (StoreServ) high-end arrays and entry-level MSA storage.

There are three technologies HPE is getting with Nimble:

There are 1,300 Nimble employees and we don’t, sadly, imagine all will survive the acquisition. It can use HPE funds to develop its product, HPE’s back-office to save its own back-office expense, and HPE’s channel to expand its own channel – and maybe enable it to slough off some sales heads as it cuts costs.

Okay, so HPE’s channel can boost sales but why did it need HPE’s channel? Let’s look at the quarterly and annual results trends: Our technology innovation can accelerate with the increased investment.”Īnd Vasudevan added this: We believe that joining forces with HPE enables us to further accelerate the pace of innovation that has been a hallmark of our value proposition to customers. Our mission of enabling applications to perform without disruption will continue as we move forward. Why did Nimble sell?ĬEO Suresh Vasudevan said in a letter to customers: “We are confident that by combining Nimble Storage’s technology leadership with HPE’s global distribution strength, strong brand, and enterprise relationships, we’re creating expansion opportunities for the combined company. The company’s lateness to the all‑flash array market didn’t help, but it recovered from that and there have been strong hints it is developing a hyper-converged offering. It IPO’d in December 2013 and shares peaked at $52, but then fell severely back. Nimble was one of three hybrid array startups, along with Tegile and Tintri, that re‑invented the SAN array and came to the fore as fresh-faced startups in the 2010-2014 period.

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