Re: Release of our Fibre Channel capability by the end of FY15....
DISCLAIMER: Nimble Storage Employee
Nimble's Fiscal Year is not the same as Calendar Year. FY15 ends on January 31st, 2015. In other words GA FC support is expected within the next 7 months at most.
While I don't disagree with you one bit that FC is a major enabler for the enterprise, I do think you'd be surprised at how many enterprise shops have been more than willing to take on iSCSI with Nimble. FC is going to vastly increase the reach for sure, you can clearly see the stats within the earnings report on enterprise adoption.
As for latency, I must vehemently disagree. If you are comparing iSCSI of yesteryear on 1Gb switches with low port buffers to 8Gb FC, then absolutely! If you have a properly implemented 10Gb iSCSI network optimized for storage traffic and compare to 8Gb FC, then your statement doesn't hold true. And at the end of the day, the few microseconds of difference you might be able to find are irrelevant compared to multi-millisecond latency in legacy storage.
As for AFAs, FC has nothing to do with performance improvements on a Nimble array. We can (and do) go head to head with them with iSCSI and win. FC is simply an enabler to go after environments that require FC.