Life is about change… Another one for me

Veeam Backup and Replication has been a love of mine since I first ran into them at VMworld 2009, since that time I have not used anything else to protect my virtual infrastructure. To the point that early 2013 I started to work for Veeam. Let’s say that working for Veeam has not changed my feeling about the company or product one bit. If anything I think more highly of them today. Before I go into the change I am making, I want to say this has nothing to do with Veeam as a company or product. My family has decided they would rather see more of me…… very surprising but they seem to like me around the house, must be my stunning looks, no don’t think it is…. more honey “to do list” I think. Long story short, that leads me to leaving Veeam Software and joining Nimble Storage.

I figured instead of just saying that I was joining Nimble Storage, I should give some of my reasoning behind why Nimble.

I started hearing about Nimble Storage late 2010, when a couple of guys showed up to my office for a meeting with me and my Manager, at the time we were to invested in our current storage provider to consider them even though the product pitch sounded amazing.

In 2011 I started with a new company, after my first couple of weeks, I knew I needed two things, a better data protection strategy and storage. Of course the first thing I did was go ahead and buy Veeam and deploy. But the storage decision took more thought and consideration because at this time the storage start-ups were numerous. I started to scour the internet and do my research, and everything I wanted landed in the Nimble Storage playground. Went ahead and looked up my old contacts and called them in and ended up going with Nimble for my storage. I have condensed the story, if you want to read the rest I did a blog a long time ago “Nimble Storage My Story”

I have been asked by a couple of people, why would I want to sell a box….. Ummm found that very interesting because I don’t consider Nimble’s offering as a box. Sure it is a storage appliance, sure it includes everything you need for you storage needs. But one key piece of the puzzle those people have been missing is the way Nimble has been developed from the ground up to use compute resources as the cap for the amount of IOPs you can get from a disk subsystem. Plus the amount of features they have added at no cost to current customers, and no need to rip and replace the old hardware they purchased. It’s not just a box, it is a end to end solution for all your storage needs no matter what performance you may require.

The Nimble device that I bought back in early 2012 was a CS220, what did it come with?

• Disk of course
• 1GbE
• Compression
• Web Interface
• Integrated Protection

Doesn’t seem like much, but wait to see what has been added over the last 2 years, I may be missing things that’s for sure…..

• Scale-to-fit, and Scale Out (Add Capacity, Increase Cache and Compute, Storage Clusters)
• Nimble Connect Manager for VMware/Windows
• InfoSight (Your Dashboard for your entire Nimble Infrastructure)
• Increased Compression
• Increased Performance
• vCenter Plugin (greatly reduces administration effort for VMware)
• All Flash Shelves
• New product lines (CS215, CS300, CS500, and CS700)
• Cloud Storage Solutions
• Not to mention feature enhancements (Triple Parity RAID, VLAN Tagging, Simplified Configuration, Role Based Authentication, and the list goes on)
• Nimble Connect (Community driven forum)

Plus they have also talked about other things that are coming

• VM/VMDK statistics collection inside of InfoSight
• Storage sizing tool
• FC protocol

Please look at the Nimble Storage presentations that just occurred at Storage Field Day 6 for more detailed information

Just to add to this, I have stayed close with the company that I implemented the CS220. When I was there we did add capacity to it by means of a shelf. They have recently upgraded the controllers to 10GbE, and also just added a CS300 to the infrastructure. The nice thing about all these upgrades, and changes, it never required one maintenance window or downtime. Even though the CS220 is over 2 years old today, it still benefits from the features and enhancements that Nimble has built in over the years, even more performance, and storage space savings.

This all comes down to why I am joining Nimble Storage. It is another great company that is adds innovation into their product line, and not just looking for ways to generate more profit. They care about their customers by providing extra features at no cost, and I believe one of the best support models in the market.

I look forward to watching the company grow and flourish, but I didn’t want to watch from the side lines anymore.

Don’t forget to head over to www.NimbleStorage.com and have a look for yourself.

Thanks for reading my ramblings.