By Antonio Neri, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Group

 

Flash is Helping Organizations Move Faster

The biggest technology transition in storage today is the move from spinning disk media to flash. In its infancy, flash storage was seen as a performance accelerator for niche applications. From there, enterprise businesses began to see the operational benefits of flash, and eventually the economics enabled more widespread deployment.  And as flash becomes the new normal, customers are driving additional requirements, like hybrid IT automation, integrated data protection and flexible consumption models.   

This demand has been driving strong momentum in our 3PAR enterprise flash storage portfolio, since we can provide both a strong flash offering as well as leverage the rest of our deep portfolio of products and services to deliver solutions that meet customers’ specific needs.  

And today, we are announcing our intent to acquire Nimble Storage, a leading provider of entry to midrange predictive flash storage solutions.  Since it was founded in 2007, Nimble has disrupted the storage market by delivering consistent application performance and availability at an unprecedented cost. We believe the Nimble value proposition is the most compelling for HPE customers when compared with other recent market entrants, and in combination with 3PAR, can provide the best lineup in the industry of flash optimized solutions for hybrid IT.

 

With Nimble, HPE Can Deliver Flash to Customers of all Sizes and Needs

We believe that Nimble’s entry to midrange predictive flash storage solutions, coupled with InfoSight, its leading predictive analytics technology, will strengthen HPE’s flash storage portfolio by expanding market reach and enabling a transformed, analytics-based customer experience.  Together, we’ll be able to bring flash optimized data services, which provide the right balance of price, performance, and agility, to customers across SMB, Enterprise and Service Provider segments.  In other words, we’ll have a comprehensive, best-in-class portfolio across the full range of the market:                 

Enterprise class for the all-flash datacenter:  HPE 3PAR supports customers experiencing rapid growth and needing a highly scalable, all-flash data center capable of supporting millions of IOPS, petabyte capacity, and a multi-tenant architecture, priced from the midrange to the high-end.

Straightforward predictive flash:  Nimble is ideal for customers needing advanced, flash-optimized data services, including all-flash, hybrid-flash, and multicloud support, underpinned by machine-learning based predictive analytics, all at entry to midrange price points and designed with ease of use at its core. 

Simple flash acceleration:  HPE MSA and HPE StoreVirtual have an installed base of over 500,000 deployments worldwide and are suited for price-sensitive customers that need simple, flash tiering support at an entry price point.

Built-for-enterprise, hyperconverged infrastructure: Nimble also complements our recent SimpliVity acquisition for the growing hyperconverged market for those deploying turnkey VM-farms with advanced data services.  The combination of SimpliVity, Nimble, and 3PAR enables customers to deploy the right data services across all workloads and deployment types.

Nimble builds on our strategy to make Hybrid IT simple through software defined and machine learning innovations.  Our comprehensive portfolio will enable customers to compose the right storage for their exact application needs.  HPE OneView infrastructure management software will help customers seamlessly manage the entire portfolio.  And, we’ll give customers the choice of CAPEX or monthly pay for use consumption with HPE FlexCapacity.

 

The Path Ahead

Looking forward, we have a clear product roadmap for our hybrid IT offerings, and our acquisition of Nimble fits squarely in it. We are listening to our customers’ needs and continuing to help them shift from the traditional data center to a software-defined datacenter, with all-flash at the heart.

A key element of that roadmap is Nimble’s predictive analytics platform.  InfoSight’s ability to monitor customer deployed infrastructure from the cloud, apply machine learning and predictive analytics to radically simplify operations and deliver a transformed support experience is a key differentiator in the storage market.  HPE will leverage InfoSight across our portfolio of storage products, further enhancing our competitiveness against large and small competitors.

Our storage DNA has never been stronger and our experience expanding 3PAR’s reach, without slowing down the innovation engine, will serve us well with Nimble. We are excited to welcome the Nimble team to HPE, and believe that together we will be a powerful force in the market and for our customers.