How did hybrid flashy bods Nimble Storage's IPO go so smoothly?

Nimble Storage provided an object lesson in IPO pricing and pricing on Friday, showing that investors love flash/disk hybrid storage startups even while disliking pure flash storage plays. The hopeful startup entered the IPO process on 15 December with starting prices of $19 - $21 per share on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE …

[DeepStorage]

Violin is the leader in AFA only because of old data

The problem with calling Violin the leader in the AFA market is the data that statement is based on is 2012 sales. Most of the competitors including Pure and Solidfire shipped under 10 units in 2012 and didn't start really selling their products until this year.

Now that there are products that deliver 90% the performance of a Violin AND have data services lie snapshots and replication from not only Pure but EMC, HP, HDS and Dell why would the vast majority of customers buy violins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheap = Business differentiation?

So what i'm reading in this article is that Nimble's competitive advantage is really price and this is a sustainable business model against established companies? Wow!

Unless you can provide differentiation in solving problems vs everyone else you're in trouble.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: Cheap = Business differentiation?

Since the first time I spoke to Nimble a couple of years ago now it really seemed like they were gunning for Equallogic as their target market. I'm sure their tech has since grown a bit beyond that but back then they seemed equipped with stuff to battle Equallogic. On paper at least the tech looked impressive. Though the first time I logged into one of the demo systems we had I was incredibly underwhelmed by the management UI (maybe 18 months ago), and the lack of ability to do many things. We ended up getting a system for a particular deployment(not sure which model, not managed by my group -- as of today the system has been working fine - though the workload is pretty trivial). All of our most important data still resides on HP 3PAR and I don't see that changing any time soon.

My experiences with storage in general (both 3PAR and other) over the past 12 years have made me far more careful, paranoid etc when it comes to managing and choosing which storage system to use for critical production stuff(and yes I have had some bugs in 3PAR as well, some minor others less so).

Nimble has a ways to go before they reach that state for me (if they ever get there -- Equallogic is a good example of a technology/organization whom has never been there for me and never will be -- same goes for HP Lefthand while I'm here).

I remember one storage company where we had a 9 hour outage because they didn't have something as simple as a solid escalation plan in place. The on site engineer was stuck twiddling his thumbs until one of my co-workers made some calls to people he knew at the vendor to(try) get it escalated. Their CEO later apologized to us in a letter and they implemented an escalation policy after that. They were later acquired by a 3 letter storage company. Their technology was good, just the organization wasn't quite mature enough.

That same organization installed some demo equipment at a company where one of my friends work(maybe a year or so ago) at (really really big company). The storage vendor decided to do some unscheduled upgrades on the demo equipment (apparently without telling enough people) and they got their products banned from the customer as a result(interfering with testing).

[hugh wanger]

Re: Cheap = Business differentiation?

From what I gather (and party seen)

- Simple installation (way simpler than a NetApp install)

- Simpler management, sparsity could also be viewed as simplicity?

- Faster by 3 to 4 times for a similar spend on NetApp or EMC supposedly

- Better compression (NetApps de-dupe is poor compared to Data Domain for e.g.)

- Realtime performance monitoring versus once a week like NetApp

- Much smaller actual footprint

- Much more TB for your money, which believe it not, does really count for something :)

Equallogic was OK, apart from snapshots and replication. Those 16Mb block/pages or whatever causes huge snapshots. I dumped a ton of them. (Plus Dell not knowing how to support them in my case)

NetApp, decent, but irritating to deal with commercially.

So if Nimble can not irritate you on commercials (year 4 arm twist!), provide a faster box, a cheaper box, more storage, simpler to deploy, simpler to manager. Would that differentiated them enough?!!