HPE Buys Nimble to expand storage hardware product lineup

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HPE has been actively engaged in developing its hyper-converged storage and networking ecosystem and has been on an acquisition spree since the start of this year. The company in January bought analytics software provider Cloud Cruiser and in February acquired privately held cloud software company SimpliVity for $650 million. HPE bought Nimble storage as part of their acquisition strategy in the storage, networking and technology services areas. Nimble makes hybrid storage devices that combine hard disks and flash drives.

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 to other recent market entrants, and in combination with 3PAR, can provide the best lineup in the industry of flash-optimized solutions for hybrid IT.  Nimble Storage signed the agreement with HPE to accelerate the global adoption of Nimble Storage’s Innovative Predictive Analytics and leading next-generation flash storage platform. Ten-years-old, Nimble has established a fast-growing business selling hybrid disk-and-flash storage systems into the low end and midrange of the market for primary, general-purpose usage, and last year expanded into all-flash storage. Nimble focuses on predictive cloud infrastructure and is one of the largest players in the flash storage space, which is predicted to reach nearly $20 billion in market value by 2020, according to IDC.

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 an 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 hyper-converged 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.

With new Nimble flash storage, SimpliVity hyper-convergence and jetNEXUS ADC/load balancing, HPE is now able to offer all the components required for next-gen computing to support the increasing complexities of containerization microservers and address the future demand to support billions of IoT devices. Ultimately, this means that HPE sees and understands the massive value in modernizing the storage architecture with flash and the continued value of on-prem, cloud-era infrastructure. According to an article published by Joe McKendrick of Forbes, 80 percent of enterprises intend to use a combination of on-premises and cloud solutions.

The year’s just getting going, and, as always, the storage market never fails to disappoint.  We believe that the all-flash transformation is just getting started and that a new generation of all-flash arrays is being born that will take what is possible with webscale architectures, cloud-native applications, and big data to new heights.  We can’t wait to see what the rest of 2017 has in store for storage.

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