 Live from San Jose, California, it's theCUBE, happy adaptive flash launch brought to you by Nimble Storage. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in Silicon Valley with the Nimble Storage exclusive product launch. This is continuing coverage. We go after the events, I extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. I'm here with my co-host, David Floyd, co-founder of wikibond.org. Our next guest is Brian Bonds, Senior Systems Engineer of eMeter. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. So you're out in the trenches, you're a customer, so we want to get to the customer's perspective. We always love to talk about it. So Nimble's also got some compelling solutions. What are some of the environments that you're operating? First describe your environment of your job and your company that you're playing in and how Nimble fits in that. We can talk about the product after that. We're a software development company. We sell to utilities across the planet, gas, power, water. My customer base is internal customers, software developers, test engineers, QA engineers and services and support. We are a virtualization first shop. We try very hard to virtualize wherever possible. The only things that we have that aren't virtual are things that can't be or shouldn't be maybe. And Nimble's proposition for us is across the board. Space saving reduction, cost reduction, ease and management and availability were all key factors in us making our original decision to go with them. And our continued decision to stay with them has been predicated mostly on the fact that they've continued to evolve the product, that they have continued to improve the features that they have while keeping that price point, performance point and capacity point all within a good balance that fits across our environment. And what kind of workloads you guys running? Because one of the things we had in the IDC guy I was talking about was the variety of workloads that these guys can support, virtualized environment is not so important. What kind of workloads are you running on top of this? Primarily virtualization, but within that virtualization there's a lot of different workloads. Windows systems, Windows systems, databases, all different types and varying sizes. We have some that are fairly small, we have some that are pretty big. We've got some that range into the terabytes in size for individual environments. But we also have a lot of other systems that run against these too. To me, I say they're minor, but it's only a number that they're minor. So we have SQL databases and Oracle databases running directly against these that aren't virtualized. So we have a good combination of all of the different types of things that you can do with the Nimble. Maybe some things you shouldn't be doing period, but we do them all with the Nimble. That's our primary storage platform and we don't shy away from throwing anything at it that we can't. I'm actually at a loss to think of something that we've thrown at it that hasn't worked for us. So it's been pretty good. So can I talk a little bit about how you're organized? You run everything there? Is it the storage, the systems? Our team is cross-functional. Everybody in our team, exactly. Everybody in our team can do everything. We have, I come from the old school storage background, so I'm very storage centric of a very good understanding of the big picture there. Same thing, we have a guy that's very strong in networking. But we all do all of the other types of things. I can go into the networking and make the changes that are needed to be made. I follow the guidelines that he's laid out for that, usually. And so that's one of the important factors for us with Nimble is that I don't have to spend weeks training somebody how to go do all of set up raid groups and aggregates. Probably shouldn't be saying that kind of stuff. But how to do all of that core level stuff, it's just done. We know. We put it in. We set it up. We need the space. We go allocate it. We do it all in a single tool. We can all do that work. Which in a lot of times, my previous position, that precluded people from doing that. You got to the point where you had one guy or maybe two guys that could do something. Well, now we move away from that into where my whole team can do that. My team here and my team out of the states can do that. We basically have a 24-hour shop now. Because we can do all of that work very simply, very effectively. And we can all see the results of that work. So you've got groups of developers that you're supporting. How many developers are you supporting? It's between the two locations here and outside the country. We have close to 200 people that we support in that. And it's a fairly robust group of people, very demanding. They're under a lot of pressure to continue to innovate and produce and innovate and produce. And that puts pressure on us to innovate and produce for them. As our customer, and gives us a real good ability to do that. So let me ask you a business question. I mean, you're supporting all these developers, et cetera. Have you eliminated storage as being one of those bottlenecks to those developers? Because I can tell you, when I was a developer, that was a major, major struggle for me. Shortly after deploying the Nimble devices, we would get that typical thing from the engineers. My XYZ is slow. That's the entire description you would get in the email. Application is slow. Go fix the storage. Because it couldn't possibly be their app, or it couldn't possibly be something else. Time to innocence, isn't it? You've got to prove yourself innocent before they'll go on. We very quickly got to the point where people do not ask me about storage. The only question they'll ask is, how much do we have? How much do we have left? Can I have is the only question performance is not ever part of the equation anymore for me. It's done, it's gone. That's the holy grail. I mean, think about it. Look at the storage side of the business over the years. That is the holy grail, where it's completely abstracted away from, it's invisible to the customers. Do you see other things coming around technologies that might kind of change that? In other words, what are you seeing that you're watching as new trends? Because it's with DevOps and with consumerization of IT, but we heard about VDI, it's very IOPS-hungry. Do you see other technologies that could put more pressure on these guys to be more innovative? All of the things you just mentioned, I think we'll keep the pressure on these guys. I also think that all of the benefits that they have are also working against them a little bit in the respect that disks are getting bigger. So your consolidation comes down. Well, that increases your need to make sure that your output can keep up with that and they've been doing a very good job of that. That's very important. That, I think, is where some people get themselves into the old school way of thinking where you go up to a certain point and now you can't grow anymore, you have to make a large expense to buy part of something to keep growing. With the Nimbus system, you don't have to do that. I know what my storage costs are flat. I know when I need to acquire more and I know how much that's gonna cost me and I know- You can plan for it. Exactly, exactly. So you're very much a VMware shop. You were mentioning the vSphere as presumably one of your tools. Do you do everything through vSphere now or in this DevOps shop? A vast majority. We try to do everything we can through there. We try to use a single tool to do everything. Every tool that we have to go out and use or purchase on top of that, InfoSight is the best example, to be honest with you that. I don't have to buy a third-party tool, pay maintenance, learn how to use and configure something to tell me what my storage capacity or my planning needs are. I can go into a single thing that's included with my system that tells me when am I gonna run out of this? What are the recommendations for maybe adding cash to a system? That type of thing. But as far as the actual work goes, single tool is the best way to go for us and the more we can do that, the new plug-in for VMware is fantastic. And again, it releases me from ever even interacting with the unit once I've got it set up. I shouldn't have to. Everything I need there. You set it up and then everything is through VMware and you deploy and everything else. Whatever I'm doing, I can switch back and forth between the different pages. I don't have different tools. So come back to the business issue, which is you're supporting developers. In setting up this whole environment for them, how much more productive have you made them? Compared with the traditional siloed environment? Yeah, it's really hard to actually say. All I know is is that every single day we get requests to deploy systems and every single day we deliver systems. Whereas in the old way of doing things, that wouldn't have been the case. It would have been days to deploy. If we needed to go reconfigure storage to add additional capacity or just to even add a data store in VMware, that could potentially take hours of work to do over time, whereas now it's very, very quick and easy for us. Okay, great. Brian, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate your commentary. We got a break, but I wanted to give you the final word. Share the folks out there. Why Nimble? Why are they doing so well? A lot of people are going on and saying, well, these guys are growing. They went public. They haven't been knocked down yet. They're still growing and they're in good spot. Great to manage your team, good culture and obviously innovative products. But as someone who has a job to do, you don't want to worry about the products. You mentioned that already. In your own words, why is Nimble? So doing so well and why is it so important? All of the things that you mentioned are very important and those are reasons they're doing well. One of the things that they're doing well and they're doing a better job of it every single day is, is they're coming to me and asking me what I need, what my issues are, what my workloads are and what they can do to help solve that rather than coming in and saying, here's what you need, which is what a lot of the other vendors do. They say, this is our product. This is going to solve all of your problems when in fact they don't even know what my problems are and Nimble is doing a very, very good job of actually asking the customers what they're trying to do. Their infocyte is probably helping a lot with that. They're able to see what their customers need and adjust to that and be able to come up with new things. Yeah, I think if you went to anyone out there and said, hey, I can give you some stability on your forecast for cost of storage and no one's going to call you anymore. I think people will sign up right there on the spot. Yeah, I'll pay that. Nimble Storage, efficiency and collaboration. That's their culture. We talked to the CEO. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate your stories from the trenches. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE extracting the signals from the noise. Wyman's looking at the exclusive Nimble Storage product launch. We'll be right back. I'm John Furrier with David Floyer. We'll be right back.