This past week, I was fortunate to travel to Indonesia and participate in our launch activities there along with my colleagues Peter O’Connor (Nimble Storage’s vice president for the APAC region), Rachel Ler (ASEAN Sales Manager), and Daniel Tan (Channel Manager for ASEAN).

Indonesia has a growing economy with a real requirement for storage solutions that provide higher performing, capacity-optimised solutions in a smaller footprint. Based on many of the conversations we had, datacenter space is becoming an issue for many organisations, as well as the skyrocketing costs of electricity. The feedback we were given was that our technology is welcomed in the local market and couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

Our visit began with a series of detailed planning sessions with our local distribution partner, discussing how we can best service and support our customers across Indonesia. We came up with plenty of creative ideas that I’m sure our customers will love. In the afternoon we were lucky enough to present to 35 local resellers who understood the true value of our technology and quickly identified that Nimble Storage is the right solution for many of their customers in the local market. I was so impressed with their knowledge and the types of questions they asked.

In Jakarta, Refany Iskandar (Director of Optima Solusindo Informatika) joins Peter O’Connor and Theo Hourmouzis for the official launch of Nimble Storage in Indonesia.

The official launch took place the following day at Planet Hollywood, starting with a presentation to more than 20 press and media agencies. Peter spoke briefly about our organisation and I spoke a little further about our solutions and the value it provides customers. Similar to the reseller event, the questions and discussion afterwards proved to me that we could not have arrived at a better time. Seeing the press so excited about our organisation is a good sense of validation.

That afternoon more than 30 customers attending the launch, where we discussed our unique approach to storage, describing the typical customer scenarios we see daily and how our technology can address those challenges. Post presentation we were all able to dine together on some local cuisine, talking in detail about what makes Nimble Storage so different.

Reflecting back, it was an amazing trip – meeting wonderful people, establishing important relationships, and enjoying the extraordinary sights of Indonesia.

• Overview of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V – June 5, 2013 from 5:00PM to 6:15PM (MDC-B338)
• Transform the Datacenter with Server and Management Innovations from Microsoft – June 3, 2013 from 11:00AM to 12:00PM (FDN06)
• Windows in the Enterprise – June 3, 2013 from 11:00AM to 12:00PM (FDN07)
• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Windows, But Were Afraid to Ask – June 4, 2013 from 8:30AM to 9:45AM (WCA-B201)

For Nimble Storage, this is our first year as an exhibitor at the show and we couldn’t be more excited. Join us in our booth #2523 to experience first-hand the efficiency, performance, and functionality the Nimble Storage CS-Series of hybrid storage systems can deliver for Windows environments. Our booth demos will include SmartStack for Windows Server,  along with solutions for Exchange, SQL Server, and file serving using Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Nimble Storage.

That’s not all – you’ll have a chance to enter our daily raffle for a $100 Amazon gift card, just for joining the conversation. You can also connect with us and ask questions on Twitter by following @nimblestorage or by using the hash tag #nimblestorage.

See you in The Big Easy!

What makes it even harder is the need for IT organizations to select various infrastructure components such as servers, storage, hypervisors, and VDI software (aka brokers) to construct a complete solution that truly works and adapts to growing needs – all without breaking the bank.

Cisco’s architecture for desktop virtualization leveraging Nimble Storage hybrid arrays.

Validated blueprints such as the Nimble Storage SmartStack, leveraging Nimble Storage hybrid arrays and Cisco UCS with VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop, eliminate the guesswork in creating a comprehensive solution for VDI. Customers across various verticals including financial services, federal, healthcare, education, legal, and retail have deployed VDI solutions based on this validated reference architecture.

The combination of Cisco UCS and Nimble with VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop wins with customers because:

Dramatically Higher Performance and Price/Performance: By far the biggest reason the combination of Nimble and Cisco UCS is selected by customers is excellent performance and leading price/performance. To accommodate VDI’s bursty I/O, many storage vendors leverage flash—but while this works really well to accelerate reads, write performance continues to be constrained. Nimble’s CASL file system delivers the superior write performance that VDI needs without throwing expensive flash or spindles into the mix. This, combined with Cisco’s superior blade architecture with large memory footprint, makes for winning cost economics.

Ease of Scaling: Most VDI deployments, whether they are big or small, inevitably grow due to continued adoption of desktop virtualization and explosion in end clients, including laptops and mobile devices. With both the Cisco UCS and the Nimble Storage solution, it is very simple to scale the solution. With Nimble scale-to-fit, customers can choose to add more flash or upgrade their controllers or add capacity, all non–disruptively. This complements Cisco’s simplified and scalable architectures for desktop virtualization, leveraging the value of UCS to easily add servers to scale to thousands of virtual desktops.

Operational Simplicity: There are many tasks through the lifecycle of a virtual desktop environment, ranging from provisioning, monitoring, and protecting the desktops. Just as important is the ability to keep the underlying infrastructure running at all times. Protection is simplified with Nimble’s instant snapshots. Most of all, Nimble’s proactive support capabilities have allowed customers to keep their systems up and running in perfect condition – one time a power outage occurred, and even though it was unrelated to Nimble, the Nimble array was able to detect the situation right away and alert the customer.

Here are a few joint Nimble Storage and Cisco UCS customers that have benefited from a high performance and efficient VDI solution:

Lindquist and Vennum, a legal firm out of Minneapolis, moved from a Dell environment to Nimble and Cisco UCS. As a result of their move, they saw a dramatic performance improvement for their end users, including application response time. Additionally, capacity requirements dropped from 11.4 TB to 4.4 TB and rack space requirements dropped by 300%, resulting not just in reduced capex (capital expenditures), but also reduced footprint, power and cooling costs.

University of Colorado at Boulder’s Housing and Dining Services have scaled their Cisco UCS, Nimble Storage, and VMware View based VDI implementation to now cover hundreds of their staff (including mobile users), after starting small and adding infrastructure as they grew. This has helped them meet their users’ needs, cut costs and meet their environmental sustainability goals.

Oaks Christian School (OCS) out of Southern California refreshed their VDI infrastructure for their Citrix environment with Cisco UCS and Nimble Storage. Their simplified experience began with the Nimble storage purchase process, where all software features and functionality are included with the base system. OCS leverages compression in their provisioning, saving significantly, and takes advantage of the scalable architecture of UCS and Nimble Storage to support their administrators, teachers and students, including a growing online school presence.

Cisco recently conducted a webcast around their desktop virtualization solutions including the simplified and scalable architectures leveraging Nimble Storage hybrid arrays for storing and serving virtual desktops and end-user data. You can view the Cisco webcast here: “Customer Insights: Desktop Virtualization On Your Terms”

You can learn more about Cisco Desktop Virtualization solutions by clicking on the links below:

Cisco Blog: Jim McHugh
Desktop Virtualization On Your Terms – Flexibility and Choice with Architectures That Fit

Cisco Blog: Rick Snyder
Accelerating Your Success with Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions

You can also learn more about the proven Nimble Storage SmartStack solutions for VDI with Cisco by visiting the solution portal pages for Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View:

• Solution Portal: Citrix – http://www.nimblestorage.com/lp/nimblestorage-smartstack-vdi-citrix-cisco.php
• Solution Portal: VMware – http://info.nimblestorage.com/cisco-vmware-nimblestorage-solutions.html

The biggest challenge I have encountered, not only here but everywhere, is that you always had to sacrifice storage for performance. For Service Providers, ensuring solid performance has depended on costly investments in excess disk capacity and expanded footprint just to offset the performance required for their customer environments to run smoothly.  For example, if your storage requirement was just one terabyte of disc space but your I/O requirement was 1000 IOPS, you would be forced to buy a SAN (storage area network) with roughly 4 terabytes rather than only one terabyte to get the random IOPs mandated by your I/O requirement (assuming Raid 50, using 147GB drive with 7200RPM).

My introduction to Nimble Storage began with the novel concept that there was no longer any need to sacrifice storage for performance.

Over the course of my career, I had purchased quite a few SANs and had established relationships with many resellers, so I reached out to one and said, “I’m in the market again. I need to buy storage.” He introduced me to Nimble saying, “You should check this out…they have a very good platform.  Since you have a lot of experience with storage and performance, then you can see whether you like this: put them through the ringer and see whether they can perform in your environment.”

The more I read about Nimble Storage and the more I tested the units, the more I liked it. An engineer at heart, I recognized that Nimble decouples storage performance from backend disks and spindles. This is one of the biggest reasons why we went with Nimble Storage.

It has been a successful rollout and all of our shared cloud platforms, today, are on Nimble. We get the performance we need without having to waste precious budget monies on excess storage or added data center footprint. And we just keep growing with it. This was not possible, in the past. The Nimble Storage performance and compression benefits include:

• 20+ times higher IOPs
• Data Center Space Savings: 5:1 reduction (performance)
• Data Center Space Savings: 2:1 reduction (compression)

Over the past four years we have seen a shift in our industry toward more hosted managed services and cloud services, attracting clients who are not necessarily quite as tech savvy—in other words, attracting business clients.  Before, our business relied chiefly on companies that manage other clients, but now such clients are starting to come directly to us.

Today our business is based on what is really the core of software services: hosted Exchange, hosted desktops, virtual servers and virtual desktops. (We also continue to provide co-location and web services, our bread and butter in our earlier history.)

Nimble hosts our virtual infrastructure, both servers and VDI, plus all the applications that we have deployed, today, and even some legacy applications that were migrated into Nimble. Altogether, Nimble is hosting all of our platforms today: the web hosting platform, Exchange, SharePoint, cloud servers and cloud VDIs.

Remember, we are a service provider, so our ability to offer some of these services is because of Nimble. We could not offer them previously, or at least not with the same level of performance. Four years ago we were strictly a network, bandwidth and co-location facilitator: we also did a lot of web hosting.  Since that time, we have focused more on storage, particularly the advantages that we get from the Nimble Storage platform in compression and performance.

We have also been offering Business Continuity products and services, which we never did before and which has quickly become one of our flagship services. Nimble Storage is used for BC (business continuity)/DR (disaster recovery) from a compute and storage perspective, replicating VMs and data. Because of lower TCO thanks to Nimble, we can offer DR to customers at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

Helping the City of Bradenton to Leverage Nimble and VMware for DR

As an example, we just deployed a DR solution for the City of Bradenton in Florida, which came to us when it discovered that it could take a full two weeks to recover its data its legacy DR system.

The process to back up was also cumbersome, as the City was forced to back up data through an agent to a different storage system, then export that data into media shipped off to a provider at a remote location. The process to recover the data was equally arduous, as the City had to send personnel to get the physical data from the remote location and then drive it somewhere where they could mount it.

With our solution, the City of Bradenton was able to leverage its existing VMware/Nimble Storage environment: we leveraged the replication that happens within these Nimble arrays—taking its backup data through the snapshots Nimble already provides and smoothly transporting it over VPNs to our Nimble arrays and VMware virtual machines here in Miami. It’s good to hear from a customer, as we did from the City, “It looks like it’s going great, just as expected.”

Today, should the City have a DR scenario, it can access its data here very simply through VPNs and be up and running on the same day: its recovery time objective (RTO) has been cut from weeks to just hours.  We also save the City precious budget monies on its contract for recovery, as our scenario can be roughly 40 percent lower than what it was paying.

From the standpoint of BC/DR, the easiest point of entry and where we can really save the client money is when it uses VMware and currently has its data in a Nimble Storage platform.  It also allows regular DR testing:  we do quarterly testing for these clients (or less frequently, if they prefer).

As our CEO, Anton Resnick, says, “We like to think that we are a little bit more responsible, and accountable, and we like to do things right. It is particularly satisfying for us to be able to revolutionize a customer’s DR plan, transforming it from one that calls for three to four days of outage to one that calls for only a couple of hours, if that.”

Finally, from the management perspective, Nimble Storage is very good: the most efficient of all the other SAN vendors I have seen.  And to have the performance baseline included in the management feature is definitely a plus.

We’re putting a lot of time and energy into building an exciting presence for attendees of this year’s VMworld conference in San Francisco, CA, featuring great demos of our highly efficient SmartStack family of products with Cisco, VMware, and Microsoft, targeted at VDI, business applications, and private cloud.

We are especially excited about the number of session submissions from customers – including several featuring our own customers – on a range of hot topics. Proposed sessions will focus on best practices for scaling infrastructure for cloud environments, circumventing challenges of VDI deployments, and 10 others that will offer up a wealth of realworld insights on storage considerations for the virtualized datacenter.

Have a look at the list of our submitted VMworld 2013 sessions and vote for the ones that you think will be most valuable to you! If you have any feedback, feel free to join in the discussion.

Looking forward to seeing you in August at VMworld 2013!

One cool thing about this result is that our cost-effective, high-performance hybrid was used for both redo logs and data. This allows DBAs to snapshot and replicate consistent database images for DR (disaster recovery) and rollback.

Here’s Tom, demonstrating mind-boggling techniques for DBAs everywhere.

For this test run, Tom used a single two-socket, sixteen core blade server, and a single CS440G over 2X10gigE links using DM multipath for Oracle ASM. He’s already lined up a bunch more configs to test, and the array still has plenty of headroom to play with. So we’ll see what Tom comes up with in the coming weeks.

Tom’s a big fan of real-world benchmarks – that’s why he insisted on maintaining great latencies (3ms log file sync through AWR) and following Nimble best practices during these test runs. As a result, we feel comfortable Oracle DBAs can trust Nimble to deliver amazing performance in their production environments.

We used some cool new InfoSight-based performance optimization tools to help us identify and clear out a few bottlenecks. These tools will be available directly to customers in an InfoSight release due out later in the year… in the meanime, we are already using them in support to help our customers get the most from their Nimble gear.

We will continue to update this blog with more details and results from the Oracle side, as well as more information on what we’re cooking up for performance junkies in upcoming versions of InfoSight.

Until then, here’s some Hammerora screen candy from the middle of one of the test runs, courtesy of Tom – the 15-minute average for the full test run was ~1.03M TPM.

Here’s some Hammerora screen candy from the middle of one of the test runs, courtesy of Tom.
The 15-minute average for the full test run was ~1.03M TPM.

Hammerora Settings:

• No think & key time
• 200,000 transactions per virtual user
• 105 virtual users
• 15-minute test run with 2 min ramp up time
• 100 warehouses

Results:

Vuser 1:Rampup 1 minutes complete …
Vuser 1:Rampup 2 minutes complete …
Vuser 1:Rampup complete, Taking start AWR snapshot.
Vuser 1:Start Snapshot 83 taken at 27 APR 2013 13:56 of instance PERFASMDB (1) of database PERFASMD (1272977337)
Vuser 1:Timing test period of 15 in minutes
Vuser 1:1 …,
Vuser 1:2 …,
Vuser 1:3 …,
Vuser 1:4 …,
Vuser 1:5 …,
Vuser 1:6 …,
Vuser 1:7 …,
Vuser 1:8 …,
Vuser 1:9 …,
Vuser 1:10 …,
Vuser 1:11 …,
Vuser 1:12 …,
Vuser 1:13 …,
Vuser 1:14 …,
Vuser 1:15 …,
Vuser 1:Test complete, Taking end AWR snapshot.
Vuser 1:End Snapshot 84 taken at 27 APR 2013 14:11 of instance PERFASMDB (1) of database PERFASMD (1272977337)
Vuser 1:Test complete: view report from SNAPID 83 to 84
Vuser 1:105 Virtual Users configured
Vuser 1:TEST RESULT : System achieved 1030899 Oracle TPM at 343103 NOPM
Vuser 1:Checkpoint
Vuser 1:Checkpoint Complete

This result shows that our purpose-built hybrid systems can perform as well as or better than flash-only solutions at a small fraction of the price. With high performance and high capacity together, you really can have your cake and eat it too!

There are three main reasons we chose this location:

• A great facility that’s compatible with our culture. The new buildings have just been modernized, with lots of natural lighting, open meeting areas, a flexible floor plan, and space for a variety of outdoor activities. The three buildings and the beautifully landscaped spaces between them are ideal for the kinds of conversations, informal collaboration and free-for-all chats that characterize daily life at Nimble.
• Customized by us for us. We are working with a clean slate in terms of interior layout and design, which allows us to engage our employees in creating spaces that help bring us together – both professionally and socially. People throughout the company have already provided some terrific ideas and suggestions that we’re incorporating into the design.
• Location, location, location: San Jose has served us well for over the past five years, and has allowed us to attract a world-class talent pool. Staying in San Jose allows us to continue to build the organization, without increasing commute times for existing employees.

 We are eagerly looking forward to moving to our new headquarters in November, at 211 River Oaks Parkway, San Jose.

Whenever an enterprise or a cloud service provider deploys a Nimble Storage array, one of the first questions they ask is usually: How much cache do I need? Often followed by: And how do I figure out how much cache I need, when different workloads put different requirements on the cache?

Great questions, because it’s true, you really do need to characterize each workload in order to properly size a cache requirement. Our research in this area has revealed some interesting things about how customers use their storage. As Nimble’s chief data scientist, I’ll share with you one of the many insights we’ve gained, but first, a little background.

Nimble Storage’s new InfoSight cloud-based service tells customers, as a percentage of their current cache, how much they really need in order to maintain good performance. For each installed array, a customer can pull up a chart in InfoSight that looks like this:

Nimble Storage InfoSight tells customers how much cache
they need to maintain required performance levels.

The left side of the chart shows that this example array had been running on empty through September and October of 2012 – it already needed a bit more cache, as cache utilization was hovering around the 100% mark, and well into the yellow. To make matters worse, around the end of November, the customer doubled their workload against this array, as seen on the right side of the chart. As a result, their cache was no longer delivering the performance benefits it should.

InfoSight now lets them know what kind of scale-to-fit upgrade would accommodate their new workload, so that they can reclaim the performance they had enjoyed around the beginning of 2012. This example illustrates the importance of dynamic cache resizing: with scale-to-fit, customers can continue to grow workload while maintaining the price-performance benefit of the Nimble solution.

How do we compute this figure? We need to understand the customer’s dynamic environment well enough to put a number to how much more cache is needed, or how much headroom is available.

To accomplish this feat, we have developed a model of how our cache works. We take the set of sensor data we’ve collected from an array – more than 30 million values per array per day, on average – and from this dataset we estimate values for the model parameters. Then we plug these estimates into the model, and compute necessary cache.

How detailed is this model? Well, for starters we recognize that some workload components are pretty much random, such as large working set of blocks being touched over and over again, in no particular order. We model a number of facets of this component.

Then there are the periodic components – workflows, cron and batch jobs, which deterministically touch the same blocks at particular times: at 8:00 a.m. each day, for example, a user logs in; at midnight, a data extract is run, and so on.

As it turns out, when it comes to sizing the cache, these periodic access patterns are as important to understand as random working set size: if your cache age (average amount of time data stays in cache before being evicted in favor of hotter data) is 24 hours, you may get significantly more benefit than you would if your cache age were 23 hours and 59 minutes, when it comes to these workload components.

Our model captures and extracts for us, among other things, how much IO for a given workload is against periodic workload components. For this IO, we can extract the incremental benefit associated with increasing cache age, at each such periodicity. The process looks something like this:

InfoSight captures and extracts how much IO for a given workload is needed against periodic workload components.
For this IO, we can extract the incremental benefit associated with increasing cache age, at each such periodicity.
The process looks something like the illustration above.

On the right side of this figure, you’ll notice a spikey chart with peaks at 24, 48, 72 hours. This figure shows that, when we isolate the periodic components of a typical workload, we generally want a cache age of at least 72 hours.

In fact, the chart you’re looking at is an average incremental benefit by cache age across the periodic components of all our customers’ workloads combined. So, it really is a universal lesson: all other things being equal, it pays to size your cache for an honest day’s workload – or two or three.

• InfoSight transforms the paradigm for how storage systems have been traditionally monitored and supported, by introducing the notion of “cloud managed storage infrastructure”.
• NimbleConnect is our new community site, where storage and IT pros can share InfoSight data and leverage the collective insights of their peers to answer their questions and optimize their storage systems..

The foundation for InfoSight and NimbleConnect was laid very early – from a realization that in addition to our groundbreaking storage architecture, scaling the company to tens of thousands of global customers would also require a disruptive and innovative approach to scaling customer support.

The Cloud Allows Us to Rethink Traditional Ways of Monitoring Infrastructure

The traditional support process starts with a customer being alerted to a problem either because of a service disruption to their internal end-users or because on-site monitoring software points to an error condition.  The customer then calls the vendor’s support center where a level-one support engineer asks basic questions and gathers configuration information. For any serious problem, the customer’s call typically gets escalated to a level-two support engineer who then asks the customer to gather and upload an enormous amount of diagnostic information.  This part of the support process can leave the customer frustrated and anxious that too much time has been has been spent on information gathering rather than on problem solving.

InfoSight challenges this traditional process by applying the following basic beliefs to the process:

1. Connectivity.  In a connected world, there is no reason why we cannot monitor our customer-deployed systems like they do.  Therefore, we should know when our systems face a support incident at the same time as a customer does.
2. Comprehensive database with extensive health information gathered proactively.  In a connected world, instead of reactively asking a customer for information when a problem occurs, we should be gathering a wealth of information proactively from our customer-deployed systems – system health information, meta-data, system logs and so on.  What is critical though is to gather information on a frequent basis, since the industry practice of gathering nightly logs and daily phone-home capabilities is too coarse in time.

Today, InfoSight allows us to monitor heartbeats and gather system health information securely from our customer deployed systems every few minutes, resulting in ~30 million sensor values per system, per day in our database!

Deep Data Analytics Can Help Transform Support into a Predictive Process

Going back to the traditional support process, even after all the diagnostic information has been gathered, it takes support organizations a long time to bring the right expertise to bear on the specific customer problem.  What is altogether too frequent and frustrating to a customer is when they are told that the specific problem they encountered is from a known defect, and are then provided a software patch that they need to apply.  The customer is left wondering why they were not informed ahead of time about the potential problem.

In rethinking this process, InfoSight leverages another core belief:

1. Deep Data Analytics Can Predict Problems.  We have a team of data scientists and support engineers that apply advanced analytics and statistical modeling to the wealth of near-real-time information to predict when things could go wrong.  We look for early warnings that can point to potential problems.  When one customer encounters an issue, we immediately query our database to identify other potentially vulnerable customers.  We look for customer implementations that do not adhere to best practices.  The support database and the algorithms and data models that we use to query the database have become a core operational process within our engineering and support organizations.

The best proof-point of the efficiency of this approach is in the fact over 80% of all our support cases are ones where we call a customer to either address an impending issue or prevent an issue!

Going Beyond Support: Cloud-Based Monitoring with InfoSight

We have been leveraging the capabilities of InfoSight to deliver superior support for the last two years.  The next logical evolution of InfoSight was to put the power of all the information and the analytical capabilities in the hands of our customers.

When we looked at the on-site monitoring applications that most customers deploy from incumbent storage vendors, the approach that such software applications use is to poll storage systems on a frequent basis to create an event database which is then transformed into visual graphs – trending information, capacity forecasts, performance monitors, etc.

Leveraging the deep data that we gather from all our customer-installed systems, the InfoSight Portal is a Cloud-based application that allows customers to monitor their infrastructure without the complexity of on-premise software, licenses and agents.

More than 200 customers have already deployed the InfoSight service to generate real-time alerts, forecast their capacity requirements, size their system upgrade needs, monitor application backups, report on the success of their disaster recovery implementations and more.  Every day we continue to hear from our customers on how the InfoSight portal saved the day for them:

• The service provider customer who kept adding more and more workloads and used InfoSight to gauge exactly how much CPU, cache and capacity they needed to keep their applications running in top condition.
• The enterprise customer who had strict policies tied to data protection, who was able to detect the one time his VMware snapshot failed causing his RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) goals to be missed, and was able to immediately rectify it.
• The retail customer with arrays in multiple data centers who regularly uses the capacity usage and change rates to compute how much bandwidth she needs to provision to replicate her snapshots across sites.

The list goes on and on.

NimbleConnect: A Community Centered around Real-World Insights from InfoSight

When we shared the InfoSight vision with the industry’s most prominent analysts and influencers, the feedback was overwhelming.  Why restrict this to just Nimble customers, these experts asked.  Why not share these insights with the broader storage community who can benefit from access to this type of information? And thus was born Nimble Connect – the Nimble storage community.

At Nimble, we believe that our single most important asset is our customer base, and our single most important priority is to foster a satisfied customer community.  NimbleConnect provides a platform for these customers to share their stories, best practices, tips and tricks, scripts, and other valuable technical resources.

Furthermore, it takes the insights gleaned from the installed base through InfoSight and returns them back to our customers, where they can be discussed and enhanced. A customer in a particular vertical market looking to deploy VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for the first time can now learn what their peers in other institutions are doing with regards to size of the virtual desktop. Microsoft Exchange admins can learn what the installed base is doing when it came to protecting their Exchange environments with snapshots. The NimbleConnect portal uses the richness of InfoSight to provide these and many other insights.

InfoSight and NimbleConnect are the first steps in a vision around how we can transform a customer’s support experience and a customer’s access to peer insights.  The vision was made possible by leveraging the cloud for unprecedented near-real-time information about how our customers use their systems, and by leveraging deep data analytics to transform that information into predictive actions and insights.  We are merely at the beginning of what we believe is possible.  We welcome you to sign up on NimbleConnect and help us make it better.

The Nimrod Champions!
Back Row (L-R): David, Team Cofounder John Farcich, Mathew Zarate, Patrick Haverty, Mike Nangle, Bo Nielson, Joey
Front Row: Sylvia, Jessica Fung, Nina Urzi

But then, something changed: the Nimrods won a game. And then another game. And then all the other games after that, until it all came down to the championship game. Final inning. Two out; Bo Nielson, from Nimble’s inside sales team, walks up to the plate. A ball. A strike. And then – crack – a hard shot off the wall, Bo furiously rounding the bases, a throw to home, Bo diving for the plate, Bo just beating the tag, and the Nimrods win it all!

This moment – and the lunch-hour cricket games in the back parking lot, the Friday night beer bashes and poker games – this is what a company’s culture is all about. The elusive “work-life balance” that every Silicon Valley start-up strives to provide has never been something that the HR department, or even the leadership team, can manufacture – it’s something that must grow organically from the start.

It helps to have the company’s founders articulate a clear vision of core values; at Nimble Storage this starts with the on-boarding process and new hire training. Better still, at Nimble each employee answers a survey every 90 days, focusing on company culture and how we’re performing against those core values. As Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh says, “We believe if we get the culture right, we’ll get everything else right.”

Ultimately, it all comes down to hiring. It takes great people to build a great company. The kind of people who integrate flash and disk from the ground up, with a proprietary file system, rather than just bolting them together. The kind of people who can stare down a 0 – 3 record, start winning games, and keep winning all the way to a championship. Sure, it’s just the Twin Creeks industrial league in Sunnyvale, CA, but it’s still a championship.