 Live from San Francisco. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Covering Nimble Storage, the power of predictive analytics. Now your host, Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman. Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here. We're at the Nimble Storage predictive flash launch in downtown San Francisco. We're wrapping up a full day of coverage. Had customers on, partners on, some of the executives on from Nimble, but now we want to get to the really smart guys. So we had to go to the well. We pulled David Fleurer out, co-founder and a CTO of Wikibon and really our storage guru, flash guru. So welcome, David. Thank you. What'd you think of the announcements today? I thought it was a tremendous announcement. They put a lot into it. They took the decision to make it part of their overall flash hybrid system. All of the all of the background services, data services they had before. And they have really positioned it extremely well going forward to take advantage of 3D NAND, which is going to accelerate the decrease, increase in density and the decrease in price over the next three or four years. So they're well positioned on a price basis. They're well positioned on a scale out basis. So congratulations to them. It's interesting. Surez said, you know, there was some pressure to be kind of a Me Too all flash a couple of years ago and they started on this journey and they decided not to do that and kind of, I'm sure there was a lot of pressure to come out with flash, but you think the weight is worthwhile for what they're really able to deliver today. If they had delivered a Me Too flash and a storage array as a standalone, I'm sure they would have had some success with it. But long term, providing the data services around it, allowing it to integrate into the processes within the data center will give them a much stronger growth path into the future. So David, you've been highlighting the 3D NAND capabilities that they've put into this solution. How long will it take the other players here to integrate that? Is that completely rewriting the software? Is it just a few minor tweaks there? Nimble came out blazing guns and said, here's Extreme IO, here's Pure Storage, and here's how we're going to beat them in scalability and IOPS. Storage has tended to be a leapfrogging business. When did the other guys leap? That's an extremely good question because it isn't that simple. You have a lot of things based on, if you choose an SSD path, and there's more than one path of doing this, if you choose an SSD path, you have to balance a lot of design criteria to that particular technology, the SSD technology. So it will not be just a slotted in for anybody else who's using SSDs. There are obviously, if you're using the faster ways of attaching storage or flash, then they will go their own direction. But for 3D NAND on SSDs, they certainly have a lead. It will take others time to catch up with that. And of course, as you know, 3D NAND is vertical, so they can add more and more and more of these layers on top of 3D so the density is going to grow extremely quickly. And their emphasis on metadata to manage that amount of data is very interesting and that's going to be, for them, put them in a good position. That's not to say others won't respond, they will of course, but they certainly are in a good position for a relatively small company, relatively early on in the game, to be well positioned for that growth. Yeah, so with this announcement, David, you've looked at all the players, you've been watching Flash for quite some time. Show us the horses on the track. How does Nimble stack up? There are horses on the track and then there are horses which are preparing to be on the track. I think there are two groups. So the horses on the track, Stream.io, very well architected box, very strong in the scale out portion of it. That's obviously a very good competitor and that's going to grow and that's got the whole might of EMC behind it. So they have to be a strong horse. You've also got other technologies. NetApp have just bought SolidFire, a very nice scale out architecture, not quite as scale out, it's more adding on things slightly more separately, but again, a very good architecture. And then you've got those are the two major ones which are in the business at the moment. The ones that are very interesting are the manufacturers themselves, the Samsung's, the Sandisks. What I would be surprised if some of those don't start or they have done started to put in their own technologies into the mix. I forgot an HP of course, they've got an excellent technology they've brought with the Orflash Aray. Hitachi also have one. IBM have focused more on the high end, high performance side of things, violin are there, but I think the interesting new people on the track will be the Sandisks, the Samsung's, the Microns of the world coming into it from a different angle and able to take a much larger amount of flash and balance across it. That's going to be an interesting market. With massive resources, massive distribution. And vertically integrated. Very different. One of those guys there are components inside of many of the components. It mentioned Microns components inside the latest HP conversion solution that they have. So interesting. David, Suresh made a good observation, I thought. He said that in the last two years we've seen more share shift in storage than we saw in the last 10 years. So, you know, give us your viewpoint as to the storage industry. I mean, we've seen massive acquisitions like Dell buying EMC, HP and IBM have gone through major changes. I mean, when we go five years from now, is it going to be a different landscape? Because for the longest times, you can always name the top four or five guys. But there's shake-ups. There's two shake-ups on two dimensions. The first is the move from disk-grade based storage to flash-based storage. And that has happened very, very consistently over the last few years. If you look at the percentage, there's a chart, I believe there, that if you look at the percentage, yes sure. Go to the chart guys, thank you. If you look at the percentage of spend on flash in what we call the latency storage, that's below one millisecond at that. We're expecting that at the end of 2016, soon into 2017, to be 50%, to have crossed over the 50% mark. So that's a big change indeed. So it really means the end of all of the high-performance disks at all. So all that's left of disk will be the high-capacity disks. Now the high-capacity side won't break over until much later in the 2019 sort of timescale. But the high-performance stuff, the people who really want to pay extra for their storage, this has meant a great deal. So that speed of that adoption is what caught a lot of people hugely by surprise. NetApp, you're seeing them suffer in the marketplace. EMC and the VMAX has equally had troubles in that area, though the extreme IOs been very strong. So what are the drivers? The drivers, it's new application, performance standards, what are some of the things that are driving that, the acceleration of that adoption? I mean, obviously things like inline compression, inline deduplication have brought down the cost. The simplicity of managing Flash, everybody who puts in an all Flash arrays suddenly says, I don't need to do anything with it. It works, it just works. I put my application on it and all the problems I used to have, I don't need to deal with. So the cost of managing it goes down very, very strongly indeed. And then there's a third area which is very interesting and that is that you can use snapshots and instead of just having to copy data on disk, you can share that data and you can share it across a whole large number of people. So your time to data, time to use data goes from being weeks to being days, hours, even minutes. So it's a much, much faster time to data across the organization as a whole. And as that last piece starts to really bite, as people have to change their ways of procedures or ways of handling storage, that is in my view, the biggest difference it's gonna make to the value of the computing that Flash is supporting. Now that doesn't matter so much on capacity stuff, but on the low latency, it's very, very important and that's gonna make a complete change in the way that storage is managed within data centers. You're gonna have seven, eight times as much data held on the Flash as you could on disk. So, David, one of the real focuses here, beyond there's the all Flash array announcement, but the InfoSight solution that they've got, the software, it's really a SaaS-based service. But the way Nimble positioned it is they automate the intelligence for your operations. And Wikibon, David, we've done the true private cloud research talking about how do we really simplify operations, how's Nimble fitting into that discussion, are they part of the discussion kind of out on the edges of it? How do they fit into the broader discussion of simplifying IT and delivering cloud solutions? So, they are a solution for that part of it, which is mainly the storage part, though as they showed in the announcement today, they can go into other areas of it as well. When you look at true private cloud, the secret of it is going to be to integrate the storage and the server and the network all together. This is an extremely positive contribution to the storage. And I believe they're going to be using this in true private clouds as an OEM, if you like, provider to it. So, they can be a very, very strong provider of storage capability into a true private cloud. So, it won't be them necessarily as the provider to the end user, but they'll be providing it to people who want to put true private clouds together. All right, that's a wrap. Good summary, thank you, David. You're very welcome. Stu, love spending the day with you again, as always. Yeah, really good stuff here, Jeff. You know, it's great to be in San Francisco, you know, but lovely facility here, too. And yes, there's so much going on in the industry and the cubes covering all of it. Yeah, and Nimble Storage only made escape velocity. They escaped their public and now everybody can watch their revenue grow and the suppression of the team really seem to be on to something exciting. So, thanks for watching theCUBE. We keep going out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We are busy into the spring season. Take a look at siliconangle.tv on upcoming. You'll see where we're going to be over the next several weeks and several months. Also, check out Women in Tech of the Week, our guests of the week, our special features, as well as now we have podcasts, CubeCast, of course we call them, on iTunes and SoundCloud. So, if you didn't get a chance to watch David live, you don't have time, check it out in your car while you're taking a jog or walk around the park. I'm Jeff Frick signing off here from the Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Launch Event. You're watching theCUBE. We'll catch you next time. See you later.