 California, it's The Cube, at the Adaptive Flash launch brought to you by Nimble Storage. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Hey welcome back everyone, this is The Cube live in Silicon Valley in San Jose, this is The Cube where we go out and extract the signal from the noise. We're here for the exclusive launch for Nimble Storage, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Next guest is Shuresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage. Welcome back to The Cube, been good to see you. Thank you very much, it's a real pleasure to be here. An exclusive product launch, really intimate but really powerful presentation. You're up on stage, you want to get into the details quickly but I want to talk about the culture of your company because your success story, you're growing fast, you've got great numbers, great product technology which we'll talk about but you're building a durable company. So talk about the culture of Nimble because this is really the Silicon Valley story. Indeed, very much so, I think when I describe what Nimble's aspiring to do, I always describe it as one side of the coin is about the business that we're building and the other side of the coin is about the organization we're building and so there are many attributes to that organization. First and foremost is the set of values that are important and we've got a great legs to focus on that. Some of the precepts that we've adopted are things like we would rather not hire a super star if that person does not know how to be collaborative with everything else, for us having no jurors is part of that. We've seen a huge explosion in being able to get just more data on whatever media that it's on. You guys have thin provisioning, you've got compression. Can you talk a little bit about DDoop? Why is it a compression architecture really rather than a DDoop which so many have? So there are really two inputs into why we think about compression and thin provisioning as adequate and why we've not gone down the data application path. The first is to say the biggest benefits from DDoop application tend to accrue in three environments, object storage, backups, and server farms where you're cloning the board images over and over again. And our perspective has been we don't address object storage with thin snapshots, we are solving the same problem that DDoop-plicated backups do. And in the case of server farms, typically you can use zero-copy cloning to deliver the big benefits that DDoop does. In most other environments, DDoop tends to deliver between a 20 to 35% benefit. And so it's not a substantial enough benefit to go after DDoop with specifically because our system is able to deliver very high performance using low-cost drives. So that was the underpinning which is given that we are already using low-cost drives, we would have to spend a lot on memory to maintain the DDoop hash tables and the savings are going to be 20 to 30% so they don't actually cost justify. Now having said that, as you start to evolve towards systems that have very high flash content, DDoop application becomes a necessary aspect of the architecture. So for us, it's not a religious argument around is DDoop important or not important. It's a question of if we're going to spend more on memory to facilitate DDoop application, more on CPU, at what point does the underlying media cost reduction justify that extra expense? We came from an environment where we understand DDoop really well. Yeah, so if you're looking at just cost and storage in the market, I wonder if we can touch on cloud because you guys are pulling the back-up piece in-house. You're seeing a lot of even the big storage guys who are starting to use the AWS as a tier or back-up to a secondary site. We talked to Rod earlier and talked about InfoSight how you are a consumer of cloud but how does cloud storage fit into your field? Now that's a really good comment. Two observations. The first observation I would make is today, cloud service providers are a key segment driving our growth but when we say cloud service providers, these are either SaaS companies or infrastructure hosting companies that are essentially saying here's a virtual machine for rent, come run your application. So that's a segment that's growing very quickly for us. In that sense, it's actually driving our growth. There's a segment of the cloud service provider market, companies like AWS companies, like Google companies like Azure that are not necessarily deploying our infrastructure and they're taking away from data that our customer might otherwise place on a storage system, right? Now typically the way we think about it is most of the data that's going on to public clouds is what I describe as eventually consistent data, so archives, back-ups and so on. It's not necessarily appropriate for transactional data. In transactional data environments, you still need an engineered storage system like ours. So you nailed it by saying, over time should backups live in a public cloud? We think so, and is that a direction that at the right time we would pursue? Absolutely, that makes sense for us to consider as the way we would solve the backup challenge. We'd still want to leverage the way we approach snapshots but perhaps think of the cloud as an infrastructure that enables us to use it as well. Sir Ash, talk about the excitement. You guys are on stage with a lot of swagger here, confidence, good swagger, I mean that in a negative way. But for customers, how do you boil it down for the customers, how do you take this excitement, share with them kind of why, what is going on, what's so important right now from the customer standpoint? Yeah, absolutely, the first comment I would make is like the one attribute of the company that I hope we never come across as demonstrating is arrogance, confidence is good, arrogance is where we draw the line and absolutely that's not, so hopefully that did not come through in the way that we presented ourselves. No it did not. From a customer's perspective, you know I have never believed more that storage architectures have to change because if you're a customer with a data center where you have lots and lots of data, moving to a flash optimized platform is radically going to change the economics of your storage. Whether it's the cost of delivering capacity, whether it's the cost of delivering performance or the ease of data management. And so I would say if you're not contemplating what options are available to you then you're arguably sacrificing some degree of efficiency. And it's a matter of time before that architectural shift will occur. We happen to think we've built the broadest flash platform and that's what's driving the rapid customer acquisition but that to a customer I think evaluating your options has never been more necessary than now. So Suresh, so speaking of that, we just came off what IDC called the worst quarter for storage that they've seen in many, many years. You guys have an embryo position with better margins than the competition. So can you speak to kind of storage broadly? Is storage just in a slow decline? Can you maintain that growth and margins as you grow bigger? How does that affect you and the channel and storage as a whole? Absolutely, I think there are really three factors that are going on that speak to a decline in overall storage revenues. The least important of which is often called out by most of the mainstream companies on conference calls which is that customers are sweating assets more, extending depreciation cycles, that's happening but that's by, I think that's the least significant reason of the reasons why storage is slowing for the larger vendors in particular. The two main reasons for years we've been used to over provisioning storage to deliver performance that applications need. Flash has come around now as an answer to that problem where you no longer have to over provision the amount of storage to deliver the performance that application needs. So by definition I think we're going to see a period of shrinkage where you're not going to have to spend the same on storage to meet performance requirements and like most things in storage when thin provisioning came it slowed down storage capacity growth and then started to go up again. So I think the first factor that's affecting the likes of EMC, NetApp and Dell is reduced over provisioning for performance. The second factor that's again affecting some of the vendors more is the fact that eventually consistent customer data, archives, large scale content repositories, a few years ago would live on very large NAS systems that was the best place to place those archives. Today increasingly object storage systems whether they are on premise or in Amazon S3 like solutions if you will are taking away from data that would have otherwise gone to Icelon or NetApp or others. And so that's also causing a shrinkage in revenue. I think those are factors more important than just macroeconomic slowdowns if you will. So Resh, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, I know you're super busy but to end the segment I want you to share in your own words to the folks watching in the technology industry right now why is it so important right now this inflection point and has it compared to others that you've seen and lived through in terms of side equals obviously it's a little bubbly on the private side we talked about that earlier so why is this so much an exciting time? Yeah you know I think if I think about the catalysts of change that go beyond storage I have never seen a time where I believe databases rules of building databases are being rewritten. Rules of how you solve security problems are being rewritten. Rules of how you address storage are being rewritten partly because there are some fundamental enabling catalysts that have never existed before. Cloud is a catalyst that in many ways was really the enterprise manifestation of the internet era. The second big enabler is semi-conductor based persistent storage flash or it's follow-ons and so that's the second big enabler that never has existed before. Analytics, data analytics at a scale that's unparalleled. So all of these when you think about the underlying building blocks it basically allows you to reimagine how you might solve a storage problem. Reimagine how you might solve a security problem. I think that's partly why enterprise is so absolutely unbelievable change in the data center right now. Final word, you know every company has a culture, you know Intel's Moore's Law. Some people have sales cultures. What is the culture of your company? Yeah, I think there are two words that encapsulate really sort of what the culture of the company is. Efficiency and collaboration, right? And so they're not sexy words but let me describe each one. Efficiency, we are all about saying can you be innovative in using every resource you have whether it's in our business process, whether it's in our architecture to the utmost potential. That's really sort of one core theme that drives us. Collaboration is all about saying we want to build an environment and a community where people as teams deliver far more than any individual is capable of, right? So it's about sort of hiring no jokes but retaining talent that's really able to work cross-functionally extremely well. Efficiency and collaboration, Nimbl Storage. You guys are on a great run and the public market's keeping you honest and the orders are flying in as you say. I don't want to get you in trouble with the. Well, it's a fun time, it's a great time. Okay, sure. So CEO of Nimbl Storage here, exclusive coverage of SiliconANGLE, Wookie Bonsikube, we'll be right back extracting the sales from the noise right after this short break. Thank you.