1. Investor Presentation
Suresh Vasudevan, Chief Executive Officer
Anup Singh, Chief Financial Officer

2. Safe Harbor
This presentation and the accompanying oral presentation contain “forward-looking” statements that are based on our management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently
available to management. We intend for such forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements contained in the U.S. Private Securities
Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this presentation, including information concerning our
financial outlook, business plans and objectives, potential growth opportunities, competitive position, industry environment and potential market opportunities.
Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors including, but not limited to, those related to our future financial performance,
market acceptance of our solutions, our ability to increase sales of our solutions, including to attract and retain customers and to selling additional solutions to our existing customers, our ability
to develop new solutions and bring them to market in a timely manner, pricing pressure (as a result of competition or otherwise), our ability to maintain, protect and enhance our brand and
intellectual property, global economic conditions and our ability to continue to expand our business and manage our growth. Moreover, we operate in very competitive and rapidly changing
environments, and new risks may emerge from time to time. It is not possible for our management to predict all risks, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to
which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements we may make. Further information on these and
other factors that could affect our financial results are included in our filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and may cause our actual results, performance or
achievements to differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by our forward-looking statements.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Although our management believes that the expectations reflected in our forward-looking statements are
reasonable, we cannot guarantee that the future results, levels of activity, performance or events and circumstances described in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur.
Moreover, neither we, nor any other person, assume responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of the forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any
forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this presentation to conform these statements to actual results or to changes in our expectations, except as required by law.
In addition to GAAP financial information, this presentation includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP measures have limitations and you should not consider them in
isolation or as a substitute for our GAAP financial information. There are limitations to the use of non-GAAP measures. For example, bookings and free cash flow are not substitutes for
revenues or cash provided by operations. In addition, non-GAAP operating expenses exclude the impact of stock-based compensation expense, which is a recurring expense for us. See the
Appendix for a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their nearest GAAP equivalent.
2

3. Founding Thesis
2013 TAM:
~$40B
1980s
DAS
1995+
Networked Storage
Opportunity for a ground-up redesign of storage
Today
Flash
Cloud
Connectivity
3

4. Investment Highlights and Nimble Storage Snapshot
4
Disruptive platform built on two foundational innovations:
§ CASL, flash-optimized file system
§ InfoSight, cloud-based management
Significant and broad-based traction
§ Diverse base of enterprises and cloud service providers
§ Broad set of workloads
$18B market opportunity*
Exceptional revenue growth with scalable margin profile
Experienced technology and management team
402
1,372
3,097
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Cumulative Customer Base
$14
$54
$126
$22
$47
FY12 FY13 FY14 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+134%
Revenue Growth
+110%
*Source: Based on company estimates from IDC and Gartner data
4

5. Flash and Disk are Complementary
Component Flash Disk
Random IO/$ 100X 1X
Sequential IO/$ 1X 3X
Capacity/$ 1X 15X
Write Endurance Poor Proven
Need for Performance Varies Greatly
Analytics
VDI
OLTP
File Services
Low High
Core design principles:
• Efficiency: Leverage flash and disk for their complementary characteristics
• Flexibility: Adapt to workloads, and as the merits of flash and disk evolve over time
5

6. Simplifying Management Is As Critical As Scaling Performance and Capacity
20XCompute
10XNetwork
Poor Application
Performance
Storage Same
40-45%*
CAGR
Increasing Demands
of Data Growth
Cloud ComputingVirtualization Big Data Social and Collaboration
Exacerbating Trends
Mobility
VM / Application Data
Management Complexity
CRM
ERP
CRM
ERP
*Source: IDC, The Digital Universe in 2020, sponsored by EMC
6

7. Our Value Proposition
CASL™
Flash-optimized file
system software
InfoSight™
Cloud-based
management/support
Non-disruptive, flexible
scaling to massive scale
Peak system health
and availability
Scale-To-Fit
Rapid Backup and
Recovery
Integrated Protection Proactive Wellness
Significantly better
performance / $ and
capacity / $
Efficiency
7

8. Tiering
Flash Arrays for High Performance
Incumbent Response
Flash Requires a Ground-Up Design
Data Management
• Compression
• Snapshots
• Thin provisioning
• Replication
• Others
Application
Integration
File System
Software
Key Decisions in
Ground-Up Design
How do we:
§ Leverage flash for performance, while
overcoming endurance concerns?
§ Leverage disk for capacity?
§ Be media-agnostic and flexible as the
merits of flash and disk evolve?
§ Leapfrog incumbents on data
management?
8

9. Traditional File Systems / Tiering Nimble AdvantageCASL Innovations
CASL: A Breakthrough File System
Uses 30-70% less disk and
flash resources
Inline Compression,
using variable blocks
Fixed blocks:
No compression
Fast random writes
need a flash tier
Uses low-cost HDDs to deliver
SSD-like write performance
Inline Serialization of
all incoming write IO
Disk
SSD (Flash) Cache
More Disk
More Flash
Dynamic Caching to
serve reads from flash
Uses substantially less, low-
cost flash to accelerate reads
Fast reads by migrating
between tiers wastes flash
Copy-based snapshots
waste capacity and
degrade performance
Pointer-Based
Snapshots
Integrated, rapid backup
and recovery
Non-disruptive scaling
in least-cost increments
Scale-to-Fit: Scale-up,
deep and scale-out
Scale-Up OR
Limited Scale-Out
CASL is more performance and capacity efficient and easy to scale, while delivering integrated data protection
9

10. Adaptive Flash Eliminates Silos
10
Traditional Approach Nimble Approach
Capacity Performance Performance + Capacity + Data Protection in oneData Protection

11. Traditional Storage Management is Inefficient and Expensive
!
#
!
#
!
#
!
#
!
#
? ??
With modern data analytics tools
can vendors predict and prevent
problems before they occur?
In a connected world why
can’t vendors proactively monitor
customer deployed systems?
Vendor
11

12. InfoSight: Cloud-Based Management
Leveraging pervasive network connectivity and big data analytics to automate support and enable cloud-based management
Nimble Approach Customer Benefits
Comprehensive
Telemetry
Analysis and
Automation Storage Management
SaaS Offering
Proactive
Wellness
Community
Learning
12

13. InfoSight Impact
Predicting Customers’ Storage Expansion Needs**
customers
expanded capacity
385 103
customers
expanded flash
37
customers
upgraded controllers
Proactive Support Prevents Problems*
92%
81%
of the cases
automatically
opened by Nimble
of support cases
auto-closed
by Nimble
* InfoSight case percentages based on 9 month period through Q1FY15
** Customer storage expansion needs based on 12 month period through Q1FY15
13

14. Market Response Has Led to Rapid Growth in Our Installed Base
14
33
97
211
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
40
131
285
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Cumulative Customer Base Number of Large Enterprises*
Number of Cloud Service Providers
402
1,372
3,097
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
*Company estimates of Global 5,000 customers

15. Broad Appeal
15
Diversified Workloads*
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
Diversified Market Verticals*
*Based on 12 month period through Q1 FY15. Y axis represents % of systems in the field that handle this type of workload
14%
Financial
11%
Service
Providers
10% Hi-Tech
10%
Education9%
Healthcare
9%
State/local
government
7%
Mfg.
5%
3%
24%
Energy
Legal
Other

16. Land and Expand Strategy: 2-Year Bookings After Initial Sale
Note: Bookings defined as a purchase order received; statistics as of April 30, 2014
* Top 50 of all customers that have been Nimble Storage customers for 4 or more quarters; Of the 50, 20 customers have 8 quarters of history.
Average: All Customers
Initial Sale Total: Year 1 and 2
4.8X
1X
Top 50 Customers*
Initial Sale Total: Year 1 and 2
2.1X
1X
16

17. Channel Leverage
Base of Accredited SEs**
Active Reseller AEs*
Engagement Levels
732
2,189
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+199%
Reseller Led New Customer Wins****
Channel Generated Opportunities***
Opportunities & Customer Wins
1,013
1,751
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+73%
66
178
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+170%
335
685
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+104%
* Total number of reseller AEs that closed 1 or more deals during the fiscal quarter ** Total cumulative number of accredited SEs as of the end of each fiscal quarter
*** Total number of opportunities generated by partners during the fiscal quarter **** Total number of new customers during the quarter where the reseller contributed 75% (or greater) of total effort to close the deal.
17

18. Market Landscape and Our Opportunity
Performance Intensive
Mainstream Applications
High-Performance Computing
Cheap and Deep
Hybrid / Disk Arrays
Archival
All Flash Arrays
Server
Flash
Archival
Real Time Analytics
Workloads
Adaptive Flash Platform
Oracle / Sql
VDI
SAP
VMware
Vertica
Mongo DB
Exchange
SharePoint
EMC VNX
NetApp FAS
HP 3PAR
Dell EQL/CML
Pure, SolidFire
XtremIO
Industry Nimble Storage
Server
Flash
18

19. Financial Summary

20. Financial Highlights
Strong revenue growth with a significant “land and expand” opportunity
Attractive and best-in-class gross margin profile
Investments to expand differentiation and capitalize on large market opportunity
Improving operating leverage and cash flow from operations
Attractive long term financial model
20

21. $8.2
$11.0
$14.6
$20.2
$22.1
$28.5
$ 41.7
$ 46.5
Q1FY13 Q2FY13 Q3FY13 Q4FY13 Q1FY14 Q2FY14 Q3FY14 Q4FY14 Q1FY15
Product Revenue Support and Service Revenue
Quarterly Revenue
Rapid Revenue Growth
Annual and Q1 Revenue*
$33.4
$14.0
$53.8
$125.7
$22.1
FY12 FY13 FY14 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
$46.5
Product Revenue Support and Service Revenue
+134%
+110%
*Fiscal year ends on January 31
21

22. Growth Drivers
402
1,372
3,097
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Cumulative Customer Base
Customers
% New vs. Existing Customer Bookings
100
49
58
0
100
200
Initial Sale Year 1 Year 2 Total
2-Year Bookings* After Initial Sale
Average Across All Customers
207
New
customers
Existing
customers
64%
36%
12 months thru Q1FY15
Land and Expand
74%
12months thru Q1FY14
26%
* Defined as the dollar value of a purchase order received; statistics as of April 30, 2014
** Number of deals for 12 month period through Q1FY14 and Q1FY15
% Customer Bookings > $100K
Number of Deals > $100K**
Bookings
<$100K
Bookings
>$100k
64%
36%
12 months thru Q1FY15
Deals >$100K
177
393
TTM Q1FY14 TTM Q1FY15
+122%
22

23. Attractive Gross Margin Profile
61.8%
64.3%
66.4%
67.2%
66.2%
Q1FY14 Q2FY14 Q3FY14 Q4FY14 Q1FY15
65.8%
69.0%
22.8%
44.8%
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Product Gross Margin Support and Service Gross Margin
Quarterly Gross Margin* Product and Support and Service Gross Margin*
*Reflects Non-GAAP Gross Margin; see slide 26 for reconciliation
23

24. $6
$14
$24
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
$3
$6
$12
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Investing For Growth While Demonstrating Operating Leverage
60
120
188
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Head Count
72% 62%
52%
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
% of RevenueHead Count
24
$ Millions
$ Millions
93
211
356
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Research and Development*
Sales and Marketing*
37%
27% 25%
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
% of Revenue
*Reflects Non-GAAP Research and Development and Sales and Marketing, which excludes stock based compensation expense. See slide 26 for reconciliation.

25. -47%
-27%
-36%
-22%
FY13 FY14 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Improving Operating And Cash Flow Margins
v
Cash Flow From Operations and
Free Cash Flow % of Revenue**
Improving Operating Margin*
*Reflects Non-GAAP Operating Margin, which excludes stock based compensation expense. See slide 26 for reconciliation
**Free cash flow is defined as net cash from operating activities minus capital expenditures
-33%
1%
-39%
-7%
Q2FY13 Q3FY13 Q4FY13 Q1FY14 Q2FY14 Q3FY14 Q4FY14 Q1FY15
Operating Cash Flow as % of Total Revenue
Free Cash Flow as % of Total Revenue
25

26. Business Model
FY13 FY14 Q1FY15 Long-Term Model
Gross Margin* 62% 65% 66% 63%–65%
R&D as % of Revenue* 28% 26% 25% 11%–13%
S&M as % of Revenue* 72% 57% 52% 28%–31%
G&A as % of Revenue* 9% 9% 10% 5%–6%
Non-GAAP Operating
Margin
-47% -27% -22% 16%–20%
*Reflects Non-GAAP Gross Margin, R&D, S&M, G&A and Operating Margin, see slide 26 for reconciliation
Note: due to rounding, numbers presented above may not sum to total.
26

27. GAAP to Non-GAAP Reconciliation
($ in thousands) FY12 FY13 FY14 Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q2FY14 Q3FY14 Q4FY14 Q1FY15
GAAP Product Gross Profit 7,880 32,499 76,581 4,965 13,151 17,240 20,564 25,626 28,224
% GAAP Product Gross Margin 60.1% 65.3% 67.9% 65.9% 65.6% 67.0% 68.8% 69.0% 68.4%
(+) Stock-based Compensation 10 48 232 4 40 38 52 102 231
Non-GAAP Product Gross Profit 7,890 32,547 76,813 4,969 13,191 17,278 20,616 25,728 28,455
Non-GAAP Product Gross Margin 60.2% 65.4% 68.1% 66.0% 65.8% 67.2% 69.0% 69.2% 69.0%
GAAP Support and Service Gross Profit (145) 891 4,941 213 430 940 1,458 2,113 1,988
% GAAP Support and Service Gross Margin -16.1% 21.9% 38.2% 34.2% 20.7% 34.1% 41.3% 46.4% 37.4%
(+) Stock-based Compensation 31 114 468 21 43 88 127 210 393
Non-GAAP Support and Service Gross Profit (114) 1,005 5,409 234 473 1,028 1,585 2,323 2,381
Non-GAAP Support and Service Gross Margin -12.7% 24.7% 41.9% 37.6% 22.8% 37.3% 44.9% 51.0% 44.8%
GAAP Gross Profit 7,735 33,390 81,522 5,178 13,581 18,180 22,022 27,739 30,212
% GAAP Gross Margin 55.2% 62.0% 64.8% 63.5% 61.4% 63.8% 65.9% 66.5% 64.9%
(+) Stock-based Compensation 41 162 700 25 83 126 179 312 624
Non-GAAP Gross Profit 7,776 33,552 82,222 5,203 13,664 18,306 22,201 28,051 30,836
% Non-GAAP Gross Margin 55.5% 62.3% 65.4% 63.8% 61.8% 64.3% 66.4% 67.2% 66.2%
GAAP Research and Development 7,903 16,135 35,247 3,150 6,318 8,058 9,361 11,510 14,217
(-) Stock-based Compensation 268 874 3,049 159 367 547 781 1,354 2,440
Non-GAAP Research and Development 7,635 15,261 32,198 2,991 5,951 7,511 8,580 10,156 11,777
GAAP Sales and Marketing 12,863 39,851 75,107 6,040 14,160 17,268 19,902 23,777 29,202
(-) Stock-based Compensation 244 1,029 3,674 176 498 623 850 1,703 4,921
Non-GAAP Sales and Marketing 12,619 38,822 71,433 5,864 13,662 16,645 19,052 22,074 24,281
GAAP General and Administrative 3,756 5,168 13,737 1,047 2,301 3,041 3,130 5,265 6,437
(-) Stock-based Compensation 267 539 1,726 117 207 331 455 733 1,572
Non-GAAP General and Administrative 3,489 4,629 12,011 930 2,094 2,710 2,675 4,532 4,865
GAAP Operating Expenses 24,522 61,154 124,091 10,237 22,779 28,367 32,393 40,552 49,856
(-) Stock-based Compensation 779 2,442 8,449 452 1,072 1,501 2,086 3,790 8,933
Non-GAAP Operating Expenses 23,743 58,712 115,642 9,785 21,707 26,866 30,307 36,762 40,923
GAAP Operating Loss (16,787) (27,764) (42,569) (5,059) (9,198) (10,187) (10,371) (12,813) (19,644)
% of Revenue -120% -52% -34% -62% -42% -36% -31% -31% -42%
(+) Stock-based Compensation 820 2,604 9,149 477 1,155 1,627 2,265 4,102 9,557
Non-GAAP Operating Loss (15,967) (25,160) (33,420) (4,582) (8,043) (8,560) (8,106) (8,711) (10,087)
% of Revenue -114% -47% -27% -56% -36% -30% -24% -21% -22%
Net Cash Provided by (Used in) Operating Activities (14,841) (18,754) (6,742) (6,093) (4,876) (3,780) (271) 2,185 452
% of Revenue -105.9% -35% -5% -75% -22% -13% -1% 5% 1%
(-) Property and Equipment, Net 1,303 3,954 13,613 658 1,884 1,542 4,726 5,461 3,728
Free Cash Flow (16,144) (22,708) (20,355) (6,751) (6,760) (5,322) (4,997) (3,276) (3,276)
% of Revenue -115.2% -42% -16% -83% -31% -19% -15% -8% -7%
27

28. Sales and Marketing
Invest aggressively to deepen
sales coverage within existing territories,
expand internationally, and drive continued
channel leverage
Customers
Continue expansion into
large enterprise and service
provider customers
People
Build best-in-class company
founded on recruiting and retaining
the industry’s best talent
Our Strategic Priorities
Technology Platform
Build on our broad technology
foundation to further extend our
differentiation, broaden feature coverage,
and further expand our target market
28

29. Positioned to Lead in the Flash-Storage Era
Opportunity for a ground up redesign of storage
2013 TAM:
~$40B
1980s
DAS
1995+
Networked Storage
Today
Flash Storage
Be the market leader in storage by delivering the industry’s most efficient flash-storage platform
29

30. Customer Case Studies

31. Fortune 500 Engineering & Construction Company
Competitor Solution
Fortune 500 Engineering & Construction Company
§ 80% physical servers; EMC & NetApp SAN
§ Struggled with performance for Autonomy e-
discovery & Oracle data warehouse
§ Application backups taking over 10 hours
Challenges
§ Performance up by 2X, despite using virtual servers
§ Data reduction of 2.3X lowers $/GB substantially
§ Snapshots -based backup eliminated backup window
§ Replication for DR
§ Power, cooling and space costs lower by $3,500/month
Nimble Advantage
Nimble SmartStack
DR with 90 days
of replicated
snapshots
Prod (Houston) DR (Austin)
Replication
§ 6U!
§ 110TB with 2.3X
data reduction
§ 30 days of
snapshots
Primary SAN: 2 Racks
Pre-Nimble Environment
Daily backup to tape
31

32. Lower TCO: Global Office Products Company
Competitor Solution
3 Racks of “Tier 1” storage
40TB Usable
Storage in 126U
Nimble Solution
2 CS 460 arrays
59TB Usable
Storage in 6U
“Nimble has given us much more
flexibility with primary storage and data
protection and a much more resilient
infrastructure – all at a much lower
cost.”
—IT Platform Lead
§ SQL Server, SAP applications
and other VMs using traditional
“Tier 1” Storage
§ Core project drivers:
– Minimize data center
costs like power, cooling
– Reduce storage
capacity costs
– Reduce complexity
9X Reduction in Storage Costs
20X Reduction Footprint
50% Savings in Data Protection Costs
Zero Impact to Performance
Replaced
With
Challenges
32

33. Consolidation and Efficiency at a Global Oil and Gas Leader
§ Global Energy leader with hundreds of
remote sites
§ Initial VDI project goal to consolidate
thousands of employee desktops at
hundreds of field locations
§ XenDesktop deployment with
incumbent storage experienced
serious performance issues, prompting
a competitive bake-off with Nimble
Challenges
§ Price-performance: 72% lower cost per
IOPS
§ Cost of capacity: 37% compression,
coupled with low-cost, Nearline HDDs
§ 50% lower recovery time for virtual PCs
§ Calls to help desk reduced dramatically
Nimble VDI Solution
§ 3000 VDI users
§ 64TB and 30K
IOPS on average
Nimble Expanded Use Cases
Phase 2: Exchange
§ 11,500 mailboxes
§ ~60TB used
§ HA across two data centers
Phase 3: ESX Farm
§ 600 VMs
§ Over 200 TBs across three
data centers
10 systems and over 600 TB of capacity in 18 months
33

34. § Storage challenges in
meeting the needs of a high-
performance Vertica cluster
- Constant trade-off
between IO and capacity
- Adding nodes to support
storage was not cost
effective
- Lack of consolidated
provisioning and
management
- Data protection difficult for
separate storage pools
Challenges
§ Reduced cost by reducing the
number of required HP Vertica nodes
- Performance to meet the IO needs
of the analytics workload
- Scale-to-fit architecture allows for
separately scaling IO or capacity
§ Consolidated storage management
§ Nimble snapshots, clones and
replication improve data protection
and eliminate risk
Nimble AdvantageNimble Solution
Customer Case Study: Fortune 50 Telecommunications Company
§ Vertica cluster processing Billions
of events / hour
§ 170TB capacity
§ Hourly snapshots
for data protection
34

35. Customer Case Study: Global Managed Services Firm
§ Global firm with over
19,000 professionals
§ Managed Services
focused on delivering
hosted Microsoft
Applications
§ EMC storage
deployed as core
storage platform
Situation
19 Nimble systems in 5 countries
Goals from an alternative solution:
§ Lower capital costs
§ Small foot-print to lower monthly
data center costs of $14,000
§ Faster backup and recovery, to
avoid traditional backup challenges
§ Scalable platform for expansion
Challenges
§ EMC VNX 7500 for 10,000
Exchange users
Nimble Solution
§ 6U of Nimble storage replaced 2
racks of EMC
Nimble Advantage:
§ Much lower capital costs
§ Data center and rack space cost
savings of ~$10,500/ month
§ Compression of 1.5X
§ Snapshots for backup and recovery
§ Non-disruptive upgrades
35

36. Customer Case Study: Leading Cloud Services Provider
§ Service Provider with
presence across the US
§ Core drivers:
• Datacenter consolidation
• Rapid provisioning
• Performance scaling
§ Large Telecom customer
with scaling challenges
prompted POC
Challenges
§ Much higher performance at
substantially lower capital costs:
§ Compression savings of 50% site-wide
§ High-density HDDs and more effective
use of flash optimize both performance
and capacity
§ Much simpler management and
faster on-boarding time
§ Current environment comprises over
600 TB (pre-compression) hosting
over 6000 VMs for hundreds of
customers and a variety of workloads
Nimble AdvantageNimble SmartStack
10G iSCSI 10G UCS
VMWare
+
Cisco
Nimble
+
36

37. Transforming Storage Efficiency at a Large Bank
§ Storage costs were 30% of
the capital budget
§ Core project drivers:
• Performance scaling
• Storage budget
• Datacenter footprint
Challenges
§ 1.5x usable capacity and 50%
lower capital costs
§ 10x lower power and cooling costs
§ Dramatically simpler storage
management
Phase 1:
Exchange
½ Rack
6 Racks
§ 2.5x performance and 2x usable
capacity at much lower capital costs
§ 75% lower power and cooling costs
§ Dramatically simpler storage
management
Phase 2:
SQL
Databases
¾ Rack
3 Racks
Competitor Hybrid
Disk-Flash Solution
Nimble AdvantageNimbleVS.
37

38. § Nimble chosen as the platform
for all 11 sites
§ Each site protected with hourly
snapshots for rapid recovery
§ Data replicated between offices
for cost-effective and simple DR
§ Significant savings on storage and
bandwidth
Nimble Approach
Transforming Data Protection at a Global Consulting Firm
Boston
Data Center
Chicago
Data Center
9 Remote Sites
Inadequate data protection in
9 remote sites:
• Tapes for backup
• Offsite tape copies for disaster recovery
Aging storage infrastructure in
their main data centers:
Boston and Chicago
Challenges
Rethinking infrastructure at
all of their 11 sites
38

39. Appendix: CASL Deeper Dive

40. Industry Approach: Add Flash to Disk-Centric Architecture
40
Incumbent Response:
Tiering
Flash SSD
HDD
Write tiers are expensive
§ High endurance flash to absorb
random writes
§ RAID protection overhead
Migration requires “excess” flash
§ Large (MB/GB) units of migration
§ Infrequent (mins/hours) migration
Infrequent migration is inherently
less responsive

41. CASL Delivers Industry Leading Efficiency
Nimble
Inline Compression
and Serialization
SSDLow-Cost HDDs
Substantially more
performance and
capacity efficient
§ Less and low-cost flash
§ Fewer, low-cost HDDs
§ Inline compression
Responsive: adapts rapidly
to workload changes
Variable blocks facilitate
inline compression, saving
flash and disk capacity
Random IO is converted
into HDD-friendly sequential
IO, allowing HDDs to deliver
SDD-like random write
performance
Flash as a read cache
accelerates reads
at significantly lower cost:
§ Compression
§ No RAID penalties
§ MLC flash
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42. Nimble Scale-to-fit
Scale at the lowest incremental cost
CS2xx
~20K IOPS, 8 TB
4-Node CS700
Cluster
Up to 500K IOPS
PB Capacity
64TB of flash
CAPACITY
200TB
CS4xx
~60K IOPS
CS7xx, AFS
125K IOPS, 16TB flash
PERFORMANCE
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43. D2D + Replication Snapshots + Replication
Primary
Backup
Disaster
Recovery
Transformation in Data Protection Model
Tier 3
(+Dedupe)
§ No backup window
§ Rapid local recovery
§ Cost-effective,
simple DR
No Tapes
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44. D2D + Replication Snapshots + Replication
Primary
Backup
Disaster
Recovery
Complementing Data Protection: Provisioning and Managing Copies
Space-efficient
clones
§ No backup window
§ Rapid local recovery
§ Cost-effective,
simple DR
§ Instantaneous zero-copy
clones (e.g., for test and
dev instances)
Tier 3
(+Dedupe)
44

45. Superior to Tiered Hybrids
Disk / usable capacity
IOPS
Latency
480 drives / 1 PB
~2-4 ms
Additional software and hardware
228 drives / 1 PB
< 1 ms
Built-in Snapshots and replication
Nimble CS700VNX7600
Data Protection
Management
100K IOPS
Additional software
500K IOPS
InfoSight
Petabyte scale
deployment
45

46. Better Scaling, Protection, and Management Than All-Flash Arrays
Scalability
Resiliency
Data Protection
Management
Scale out only
Dual parity RAID for SSDs
Additional software
Additional software
Scale-to-fit (Scale-out, scale-up, scale-
deep)
Impervious to flash failures; triple parity
on disk
Snapshots and replication
InfoSight
• All data on flash
• 500K IOPs
• Latency <1ms
Nimble CS700 ClusterXtremIO Cluster
46