8/13/2023 0 Comments Varun mehta nimble storageAfter two and a half years of development, they’d achieved the impossible sounding 10x improvements at a competitive price. They combined primary storage and backup in one architecture and developed new file-system software to manage it all. They took advantage of flash in the areas it was best, but also used standard disk drives where it made sense. They drew on all of that experience to build Nimble’s system. He has a PhD from MIT and won a gold medal in CS at IIT Delhi. He architected key parts of Data Domain’s file system. Varun was VP of engineering at Data Domain. The original Nimble Storage team in 2008 Varun, Jim and Umesh present day He answered us at every turn and never wavered that the pivot was the right thing to do, which after endless hours of debate won us over. Our co-investors from Accel and Lightspeed joined us in pressure testing the plan-we pressed him hard. But there was nothing funny about his recommendation-it was a huge risk. He’s a calm, deliberate man with a youthful demeanor and a wry sense of humor. We’ve known Varun since he was an early engineer at NetApp and worked closely with him during the months that Nimble incubated here at Sequoia. But they also knew that they wouldn’t be able to support the cacher and still have the resources to develop a next generation primary-storage system. Varun and Umesh were willing to bet the company they could pull it off. The answer: a daunting 10x performance improvement for little additional cost. Varun and Umesh, along with their first marketing execs Dan Leary and Ajay Singh, talked to about 100 prospects to find out what would convince them to buy primary storage from an upstart. The fundamental go-to-market dynamic remained, however. Nimble saw a chance to target mainstream businesses, but thought the window wouldn’t stay open long. Because flash is more expensive, established storage companies treated it as an option for the high end of the market. Flash drives are a lot faster than traditional disk drives and provide businesses speedier access to their data. Every new entrant that’s broken through has first succeeded in an ancillary market.įrom a technology standpoint, however, Nimble’s plan had merit. Data storage is such a mission-critical function for most businesses-and EMC and NetApp are so well entrenched-that customers just don’t buy from startups. The venture graveyard is full of startups that have taken on the primary-storage market. Instead, they proposed building a primary-storage system that incorporated flash, a much bigger opportunity, but a far riskier one. Shockingly, Varun and Umesh wanted to kill it. Beta customers loved the cacher and it looked like a hit. Nimble Storage, the company he started 18 months earlier with Umesh Maheshwari, was testing its product, a flash-based caching appliance, or “cacher,” that sat on top of existing storage systems and dramatically improved I/O performance. All of these things, these data management functions, which are really hard to integrate into the server, that is why you still need your traditional storage array.In July 2009, Varun Mehta-a first-time founder-was driving toward a courageous decision: giving up a sure success for a long shot at disrupting a major category. “The problem it doesn’t solve is your resiliency and your data protection problem, because you still have this need to take snapshots for instance, to replicate your data off site. It provides data much closer to the application, which is good,” he said. “Having flash close to the application is very helpful. Mehta was also asked about how flash could make a difference in the storage market. We do believe that the combined flash plus disk market is going to be the vast majority of all the storage that is going to be shipping for many years.” Making a difference in the storage market “We were one of the earliest flash companies to get started, and that allowed us to stake out the largest area. But then you look beyond the market entry to five to 10 years out then you say OK, how can I have the largest footprint,” Mehta said. “That was very important and defined our initial product. The first was market entry and where the path of least resistance led. When asked how a company, such as Nimble, can build a feature and sustain it through future growth, Mehta explained that back in 2007 Nimble looked at a few things involving flash. Varun Mehta, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Nimble, joined Stu Miniman and David Floyer of theCUBE to talk about his company’s philosophy surrounding flash storage. Not only do adaptive arrays make it easier and faster to access data, they can also be customized so that users only pay for the storage capacity they use. At the recent Nimble Adaptive Flash Launch, Nimble announced an evolution of its adaptive flash array, giving companies more options when using a cloud solution for data storage.
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