Nimble Storage

Nimble Storage — the producer of disk storages founded in 2008. The company offers hybrid storage systems (turn on traditional hard drives and solid state drives) and also the solutions constructed only on a flash memory (All-Flash). By the beginning of March, 2017 Nimble has about 1300 employees and more than 10 thousand clients in 50 countries of the world. The headquarters of the company is in San Jose (the State of California, the USA).

Hybrid storage systems combine SSD drives and traditional hard drives that theoretically provides performance almost a flash storage, but with advantage of smaller cost of disk resources. In practice, however, the price for gigabyte at a flash arrays turns out almost same level that at matrixes on hard drives, and it causes fast reduction of sales of disk DWH in general.

Nimble Storage develops also technology of predictive analytics InfoSight for monitoring and capacity management of storage and readiness level. The company states that InfoSight provides "six nine" now, i.e. availability quotient of 99.9999% for storage resources. In February the company provided also the system of block storage Nimble Cloud Volumes of a corporate class which allows customers to store data locally or in a cloud of AWS or Azure without binding to any of them^[1].

2017: HPE buys Nimble for $1.1 billion

On March 7, 2017 the producer of the IT equipment and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) services announced acquisition of Nimble Storage for $1.09 billion. Thanks to this transaction the buyer hopes to strengthen the positions in the fast-growing market a flash systems.

The cost of purchase of Nimble counting on one action is $12.5 — it is 45% more than a quotation rate of the company to closing of the exchange on March 7, 2017. Besides, HPE agreed to undertake $200 million unsecured remunerations in the form of equity participation which will be paid to the closing of the transaction planned for April, 2017 reports Bloomberg.

Office Nimble Storage

Having caught storage systems of the initial and average level of Nimble, the HPE company will be able to satisfy customer needs in all segments and will record profit increase in the first year after execution of the transaction, says HPE. The analyst of Mizuho Securities Abhey Lamba considers that HPE can accelerate growth rates of business of Nimble.

According to forecasts of researchers of IDC, by 2020 the volume of the world market the flash storages will grow to $20 billion from $15 billion in the 2016th. According to the results of the first quarter of the 2017 financial year closed on January 31 the 2017th calendar revenue in DWH division of HPE decreased by 13%. The products Nimble are capable to recover business of HPE in data storage area, analysts of UBS Securities believe.^[2]

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