 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's The Cube, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.com, and you are watching SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube, here in Oracle OpenWorld 2015, here from the Cisco booth 801, joining me for this segment is Dan Leary, who's the VP of products and solutions with Nimble Storage. Dan, it's been a little bit since you've been on the program. Welcome back. Thank you, it's great to be here, Stu. All right, so Dan, products and solutions with Nimble Storage. Cisco's a big partner. What's been new in your world recently? So, you know, I think as you know, we've been a big partner of Cisco's for some time through what we call a set of smart stack integrated infrastructure solutions, and that's been a really blossoming partnership for us. The rate of joint customers that we've been building has been double the growth rate in our overall business. We've put out a bunch of new smart stacks this year, Oracle being a big component of that, and we're really excited about the momentum that we've been building here. Yeah, so Dan, I think back, gosh, it was three or four years ago, wikibond wrote the first industries forecast on converged infrastructure, and everybody said we were nuts. We were like, you know, two-thirds to three-quarters and all storage solutions will be bought in systems, in converged, cloud, of course, has been growing much. Things have changed quite a bit. What have you been seeing? How much of Nimble's business is in solutions like what you've got with Cisco in partnerships where we're building the whole stack versus just kind of having that storage standalone discussion? Yeah, I mean, there's no question, that momentum, and I remember when you guys put that study out, there's a lot of eyebrows raised about the numbers that are in there, and what we've seen in our business has absolutely reflected that. You know, it has grown at an incredible pace. We talk to customers all the time, it makes sense, right? Whatever we can do to reduce that risk of deploying a solution and know that we're going to get the right answer has been really successful for us, but I think the other thing for Nimble has been some of the industry dynamics that have been going on, and we all work through these co-opetition partnerships that exist, and in many ways what we've seen happen in the industry, particularly the last few quarters, has been really favorable to Nimble, and we're excited about what that's meant for us. Dan, you and I were talking off-camera a little bit. The storage industry had certain kind of rules that were kind of tried and true. We understand how you go in and fight, how you get to the channel, how you build those relationships, and getting somebody off of one brand or making significant shifts was tough. Enterprise storage was bought on risk, and I have something, it works in my environment, but it feels like things are losing up. Obviously major changes, massive acquisitions, new companies coming out. You guys are part of some recent IPOs, new players that are finding success in the marketplace. Can you pinpoint what are some of those critical changes, and why are things changing much faster? It's true. I can remember back when we launched Nimble a little over five years ago before this huge crop of change had occurred, and a lot of people said, is there room for new storage startups at this day and age? How are you going to convince large enterprises to put their most trusted data on a startup? And if anything, when we predicted that we were going to see some of the largest mainstream incumbents' product lines give way to a new set of flash-centric storage architectures, again, a lot of skepticism. But what's interesting now, I was talking to a couple of prospects of ours last week, and they're saying, look, with what's going on in the industry right now, it's not clear what the roadmap of some of our products are going to be, given some of the changes that are going on in the industry. And if anything, I think everyone's saying, look, I need to consider my incumbent, but I have to consider some of these newer entrants that are out there. It's almost less risky than kind of going with that proven course. And that's a big change from where we were just a couple of years ago. Yeah, so, I mean, Dan, on the one hand, flash has been kind of this wave that's been driving a lot of these changes and the architectures. But we kind of said it's not just one technology. It's various pieces. There's changing applications. There's changing purchasing habits. Boy, in the keynote last night, Intel was talking about the 3D X-Point. So where do you guys look at kind of the medium itself? I mean, disk, flash, potential replacement kind of technology. How important is that discussion versus kind of the overall solution and the partnership that you're forging with your partners and customers? Yeah, you know, it's a great question. And you know, we look at it, you know, if you look back to our vision, we believe flash was going to be this huge disruption, but it's an ingredient in solving the problem. And we never viewed that flash alone was going to be the answer to all these solutions. And so it's interesting, as we've seen some folks saying it's going to be an all flash data center or flash alone will be the answer. And then we look at remarkable what Intel is potentially capable of doing with some of these. I can see a world where we're going to have multiple flavors of solid state in the data center. And I think it just speaks to there's enough complexity, enough going on with a mix of different applications that have a different need of requirements, right? Some need performance at all costs. Some need a blend of performance and capacity. We have various needs of data protection. I think what we're going to find is architectures that have the ability to take advantage of multiple media, leverage their strengths while overcoming some of their weaknesses are going to be the wave of the future. And I think looking at five or six years, it may not be a world of flash and disk. It may be multiple blends of solid state media. It's going to be an exciting time for sure. Alright, you bring up a great point. I mean, storage has been such heavily fragmented marketplace. It's not one market hack. It's not even 10 markets. There's so many different, if you talk from the lowest SMB commercial customers all the way up to the big enterprises and then various workloads. I want you to comment. There's three big trends that we've seen, the new architectures that get a lot of discussion. I'm curious how Nimble looks at this. It's all flash arrays. It's hyperconvergence. And then on the file side, things like the scale out NAS, maybe a little bit of object in there. How does Nimble play? And what do you think? Am I missing any? Or how does Nimble fit into those kind of discussions? No, those are three big trends. And I'll even bring up, I think, a fourth that fits into the picture in a moment, too. But from an all-plash perspective, one of the big announcements that we made over this summer was the introduction of a software mode that we call all-flash mode in our system. And what's been really well received by that from our customers and prospects is the ability that says, instead of a customer needing to deploy different silos of infrastructure, so an all-flash array and all the results in complexity for performance apps, hybrid and the like, what we've said is, look, from a single consolidation platform, now within the power of our software, customer can turn the knob to give the performance that each app delivers. So those apps that want a hybrid experience, I hit the button that I've got that. An app that wants the all-flash experience. And effectively what that's doing is it's pinning all of that data so that it's guaranteeing all the I.O. is being served out of flash. But the big advantage is, I don't have to manage multiple platforms and often multiple different OSs and different interoperabilities. So we've seen a lot of interest and a lot of growth and demand from that from our customer base as a way that's moved up. And it's part of a trend we've seen for a while where we didn't assume a particular ratio of flash to disk within our systems. So four or five years ago, we had customers with three, four or five percent flash when we were competing primarily against disk arrays. Now we're seeing customers with 50% flash ratios and they're serving all the I.O. out of flash. But for data protection, things like snapshots, they're still storing all that data very cost-effectively on disk. So that's been a big shift and that's how we've kind of played that advantage across flash. So if I hear it right, you're almost like creating multi-tenancy inside your own box. Is that right? You can almost think of it that way. I think that's a good way to view it, right? Figure out what the app needs and here's a really important part of that. None of that would really be possible if we didn't have the ability to have visibility of what was going on within those applications. And this is where I think there's a big trend going on with something you're familiar with from the past to what we call InfoSight, right? The ability to really, from the cloud, proactively manage all of this data. And I really think that's something that is changing the whole face of our industry. And I think looking at what we've seen from announcements in the industry today, everybody's saying, look, if you don't have some form of cloud-based analytics that can help predict what's happening, you're really not able to solve the problems of the modern flash data center. So for us, InfoSight is now proactively addressing 90% of our customer problems, less than 10% of our customers calling us, and it's completely changed the relationship with our customers. And I think we're only seeing the beginnings of what those kinds of solutions can do within our industry. Okay, great. So that kind of covers the all-flash array piece. What about the rest of those architectures we talked about? Yeah, so you, I think, mentioned hyperconvergence and convergence. And of course, we already talked about where we play with convergence with Cisco and we talked about what we're doing within SmartStack there. You know, what's interesting, you know, if you look at a big part of what was driving hyperconvergence, it was simplicity, right? All the complexity of pinning up a separate network, storage, a sand, compute. And the good news is we made huge strides along that in the last couple of years. You look at what Nimble's done with our integration within Cisco, we look at our integration within VMware, and it's now possible from a single pane of glass to go in there and bring up that entire stack. I think there's still a role for hyperconvergence and we see a big role for that out there in the marketplace. For us, we've been looking for a strategy that says how do we compete in the market in a way that really adds value within our partners? And how do we do it in a way that addresses the broader needs of our customers? And so for us, our customers are telling us they love the fact that they've got a solution that gives them flexibility in scaling, right? So I can independently scale any dimension in that solution. And I think they run into some challenges with some of the hyperconverged solutions that don't offer that same level of flexibility. So let me ask you, when we dig into hyperconvergence one of the things that is kind of a huge benefit to customers is really migration costs. So if you think of traditional storage when I get the device, you know, of course I need to migrate on it, when I'm adding or removing nodes there's usually challenges in how I do that and if I'm, you know, getting rid of a box you know, there's migration costs. So with hyperconverge when adding a simple as just plugging it in and it just becomes, you know, a single distributed pool you know, I kind of eliminate those. So, you know, is that something that Nimbl is helping to solve, kind of those migration costs? Yeah, I mean, look, there's no question that's been a big part of the value problem and you know, more and more these days our customers aren't tolerant of any kind of downtime whether it's data migration whether it's transitioning arrays from one location to another and that's where we think, you know, that data services are so fundamental even if I don't need that performance for a single app across an entire cluster the ability to kind of seamlessly come in and add compute and add storage seamlessly migrate that data and do it all without downtime is really essential and so I do think that's an important trend. I think it's one that's going to continue and I know we've talked in the past about, you know, the Wikibon perspective there if you can't offer those kind of continuous it becomes a real challenge in the competitive space. Sorry, and the last piece was really kind of the capacity discussion things like scale out NAS and you said maybe there's even another category that you wanted to bring up. Yeah, you know, and that's a space that I think where we've seen movement to the cloud that's been one of the most aggressive areas, right? That on-prem NAS has been moving more and more quickly to the cloud the flexibility and the agility that the cloud brings is a real trend there and I think that trend is going to continue. Nimble is not directly today playing in that space today we've chosen to focus on the applications that really need that high availability and performance so we're around like, you know, the databases and the mission critical applications in that space but I think we're going to continue to see that growth and we're going to continue to see a way where customers are looking to migrate very seamlessly from, how do I take that stuff that's deployed in the cloud and how do I interoperate it with what I have back in the prem solutions that facilitate that migration back and forth are going to be more and more important as we go forward. And then I think the other trend that I was referring to was the data analytics and the cloud where we play within InfoSight and I think more and more what we're seeing is the need to have visibility that goes beyond just the storage component of the infrastructure so what we're saying is, you know, as an example we put out a feature earlier this year that we call VM Vision and so that was extending the ability of InfoSight to manage not just the nimble arrays but actually be able to go all the way up the stack so that in the virtualization layer I could resolve a latency problem whether it exists in the compute layer and the sand or all the way back in the storage itself. I think that's going to be a trend we see more and more of and part of our vision is how do we continue to extend what we're doing beyond storage and take on a broader component of the entire data center over time. That's great, love that. The discussion we've had in big data for the years is it's not just about collecting data or storing data in the storage when I can leverage that data create new insight, new information and hack to even new businesses then it almost doesn't matter what it costs to do that because I'm going to drive new business value and be able to just get incrementally so much more out of it. Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing when you have the right set of big data at the right point it not only helps the customer really manage their entire data center but because that changing relationship between the customer and the vendor we find for example we're able to learn things about what our customer base is doing that immediately trans back into changes into our roadmap. If we have a bug or potentially service impacting issue suddenly we can now determine are 10 of our customers vulnerable is it a thousand and then take the appropriate remediation tactics with that data and I think that is a really exciting thing that will allow our customers to get that five nines plus availability that wouldn't be possible without that kind of visibility. Dan I want to give you the final word in the interview here. You're talking to your customers where are their minds at when it looks at the storage market and the solutions in general yeah well no surprise right with the changes going on in our industry there's a lot more uncertainty and I think a lot more of them are asking questions about when they're making a decision they're thinking a lot more about not just what the product they're buying today is but wanting to understand the long term relationship they're going to have with their vendor I mean that's been true for a long time but it feels to me like the whole way they're viewing entering a new relationship has evolved and they want to know not just where their vendor is today but kind of what's the vision over the coming year or two and I think it's important for all of us in the industry not to be afraid to have that long term conversation about where we're going and helping our customers be on that long term path with us and it's something we're excited to be a part of as we go forward here. Alright well Dan I appreciate you sharing some of the vision as to where Nimble's going and where your customers lines are at. I'm sure we will catch up with you many more events going forward and we've got some other Nimble folks and customers coming on the program later this week so stay right with us we'll be right back with our next guest here from the Cube at Oracle Open World 2015.