 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. Okay, welcome back, and we're here live in Silicon Valley for the Nimble Storage exclusive coverage of their product launch. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out through the events extracted from the noise. My co-host is David Fleuer from Wikibon.org. Our next guest is Ryan Miller, technology architect with Milliman. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you. See you up on stage, given the testimonial. So, what was the main thing that got you attracted to the value proposition that you were talking about? Yeah, so Nimble providing both the performance and the cost, it's a huge thing for us to be able to do a lot with a little. And that goes both in the framework that they're providing for IOPS and capacity, but also physical rack space. Being able to consolidate our co-location facilities, things like that. Describe your role and your purview within your organization, and so the folks can understand the context of that. Sure, so within our group we develop software for benefits administration, 401k pension plan, whatnot. And so we develop the software that we host and manage internally. So we're responsible for everything from the SDLC that's involved there with the infrastructure and everything about that. We're implementing the Nimble to achieve a couple different aspects. Historically, we've dealt with data warehousing, but also with a hypervisor, virtualization, file systems, things like that, where we've slowly consolidated some things to it. But we also have some legacy storage facilities that we need to, again, continue that consolidation. What was the, go ahead, David. So what was the business requirement that you had? What was the business function that you had that you required, and what made you look at Nimble storage or any other storage at that time? Yeah, initially we had, like I said earlier, there was a Greenfield opportunity for a data warehouse type platform that we needed a lot of throughput. We didn't exactly know what we needed performance wise we knew there's a lot of capacity needs. And the traditional method of how we deployed the storage was it's going to be very cumbersome, very expensive, and just not very efficient. And so we're looking for another opportunity to leverage something more modern, something a little bit more space conscious and also conscious of the cost of deploying it. So you said data warehouses, can you give a little more detail about what you were trying to do there? So in our transactional databases, we needed to get the data off onto another platform that we could report it on. So we have a detailed process that was extracting that data and loading it into another environment, manipulating it a lot. So a lot of input output, a lot of data churn, and finally presented into a reporting side database. We did that for all our environments, development tests, pre-production production. So we've got a lot of varying times of when we need that performance, but also a lot of that churn creates havoc on the traditional systems where we're just bottlenecked by the, you know, the Firebird Channel type IOPS that we were accustomed to. So, that was the challenge. So that's where the 10-gauge canvass was. Yeah, 10-gauge-esque, it was new for us, getting off the Firebird Channel and deploying all new networks for that, dedicated for it, and really being able to utilize that throughput, but that the network level at the host level and at the storage level all the way through right now. So what was it about the Nimble storage that was particularly useful in this data warehouse, ETL environment? I think the unpredictability initially of what our IO requirements were, Nimble was able to extend the ceiling, so to speak, to allow us to be more flexible in what we were deploying the system for. The ability to have a lot of storage, but also have the capacity for performance, that flash we were able to expand our flash capacity on it and upgrade the CPU capability as well. And in those 10-gauge interfaces, all of that allowed for the storage platform to no longer become or be the buffer, or the bottleneck. So that then allowed us to focus on our efforts to optimize the process, the software that we had, and the translations and whatnot. So storage, was it time to innocence, isn't it? If you're a storage person, you're always the cause of every problem, so you have to prove you're innocent. That came down significantly. Absolutely, and we're a smaller group within our technology group itself, so we had to do everything. And having yet another technology platform that needed dedicated resources or duplicate resources so that you had a little bit of overlap was another cost factor. And with a Nimble, you really can just let go of that mindset and allow other people to take advantage of their basic knowledge of networking and everything else and actually manage the platform as a whole. So from a business perspective, you've eliminated storage as one of the bottlenecks there. What impact does that have on the development teams themselves? I mean, you're doing this for a purpose to develop stuff, get it out to your customers, so get new services out to your consultants. What impact has it had on that ability to deliver stuff more quickly to you? Sure. It has allowed us to more rapidly expand our needs, whatever it may be. Troubleshooting, if we need copies of data, we can do that very easily. If we need to expand it or change the way that we're processing it so that allows the developers to optimize their logic a little bit better so that we're no longer blaming the storage. We can blame the other things now. We can focus on optimizing that. So ultimately, we found these other issues and we're able to optimize those and actually give reason and justification to optimize them and to spend time researching it and making those things better. Now we got a better product, right? And we're not focused on, it could be a number of different issues. We don't even know where to start necessarily. Now we know it's not this, it's not that and we can focus on these other things. You eliminated storage as a reason in the development shop. That's a pretty good feeling, isn't it? Right, absolutely. What about InfoSight? Does that help you at all? Yeah, InfoSight, I've been with Nimble before it existed and so I saw the evolution of it. They've continued to add more data to it than I could ever really imagine would be needed initially, but now I understand why it's there and being able to see from the basics of here we are, here's the trajectories, this is what we're gonna need to. We are actually touching capacity on our flash or not and those upgrade the type of needs, but also being able to compare the different types of workloads, seeing where we're optimizing our compression usage or data usage, where our data protection isn't there or isn't meeting our SLAs or whatever. It's a nice single pane of glass to really see our systems along with others within the company to see how we compare amongst them. Fantastic, so if there's one feature that they were gonna take away from you, from your Nimble storage, which is the one that you would hang on to and not allow them to take? Interesting, I've leveraged the in-place upgrades quite a bit and looking forward to the 700 series being able to do that is a very powerful feature, I think, but ultimately the snapshots that are built within the platform, that took away a burden completely, especially with our data warehouse project, being able to back up the terabytes upon terabytes of data, get it off and manage that versus, because it's a secondary set of data. Our primary data has already got the traditional backup system currently still and so it solved an issue where we no longer had to deal with a third party or anything, the backups are there, they're replicated off-site and that's good, so that's a really good feature that we need. Ryan, we gotta go, I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts with us. We'll give you the final word, share with the folks out there. They had a lot of customer success we had Rod on earlier, so share with the folks out there in your own words, why is Nimble so great? Why are they doing so well from a product, technology, and company standpoint? I think one of their main advantages is that they got to start from scratch, they got to really rethink the way the hardware is utilized. They're not backfilling and trying to deal with legacy and you got some really smart guys on the team. Everybody's very smart and the way that they've leveraged it and optimized it, nobody else can do this. Obviously they've patented everything here, but. And they've gone public. Exactly, the rocket ship is in orbit. Exactly, so they're doing it right, they've thought it out right and they're moving forward with it and taking into account all of the different needs of our customers. Well thanks for coming on, Dave and I love to hear from practitioners, people in the trenches actually implementing it, not the vendors and their story, obviously validated. Thanks for coming to you. We'll be right back with our next guest here on the ground live in Silicon Valley for the Nimble Store's exclusive coverage of their new product launch. We'll be right back after this short break.