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Update: Nimble has been remarkably successful since it began shipping its hybrid flash-plus-hard-drive gear two years ago. The company, which focuses on small and mid-size enterprises, has amassed more than 1,100 deployments across more than 600 customers and hopes to be bringing in quarterly revenue between $25 million and $35 million relatively soon, Vasudevan said during a recent interview. It comes up against large vendors such as NetApp, Dell and EMC about 85 percent of the time, he added, and it typically wins those deals.

Flash storage is a white-hot market right now because of the significant performance and efficiency improvements it provides over hard drives — important considerations in a world where virtualization reigns supreme — and because the gap in price between the two is closing fast. In the past several months, EMC paid $430 million for all-flash startup XtremIO, while Violin Memory ($80 million) and Pure Storage ($40 million) have both brought in hefty investments. Nutanix and Tintri, both of which, like Nimble, fuse flash and hard drives and target mid-market businesses, recently raised $33 million and $25 million, respectively.

Putting both flash drives and hard disks in the same array means customers can save money on bulk storage while still getting the flash performance boost where it’s needed. As I explained when covering Nimble’s previous funding round in July 2011, customers seem to love the flexibility of its appliances. They can change the ratio of flash to hard to disk capacity to suit their needs, and some customers even use a single Nimble appliance for both primary storage and backup (with hot data in flash and backup data on the spinning disks).

Nimble is eyeing late 2013 or or 2014 for its IPO, Vasudevan said, although it raised its final funding six to nine months before it planned to because outside firms kept approaching it with aggressive and attractive term sheets. In the end, Nimble took money from all of its existing investors as well as newcomer GGV Capital. Vasudevan said the new investment will help fuel international expansion as well as a planned surge in headcount over the next 18 months.

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Network agnosticism is becoming a selling point for flash storage. Earlier this week, Nimbus Data said its new Gemini flash arrays can be software-configured to run on Ethernet, Infiniband or Fibre Channel networks. That’s important for companies that don’t want to pay for lots of new switching hardware to handle network upgrades.

Pure Storage’s FlashArray initially supported Fibre Channel networks only. That limited the product’s appeal for the many businesses that run all Ethernet in their shops. The company is also adding snapshotting — technology which lets users restore data quickly in the event of a problem. The new features will come as part of a free software upgrade to the company’s Purity operating environment, now in beta and slated for release this fall.

Pure Storage CTO John Colgrove (left) and CEO Scott Dietzen.

The Mountain View, Calif. company also announced a new VMware web client plug in so that admins that manage and monitor  virtual infrastructure  will be able to manage FlashArrays from within their familiar vCenter console.

Flash storage in general is taking off if judged by the sheer number of press releases generated in the past month. The technology remains more expensive than disk storage but that price delta is coming down and vendors are also addressing longevity concerns users have about the use of flash or solid-state storage.

Last week, IBM got into the act, announcing plans to  buy  Texas Memory Systems and its flash expertise, for an undisclosed amount. That acquisition should make IBM more competitive with EMC, which earlier bought EXtremeIO for its flash wherewithal.

All of that action means that smaller, but well-funded startups like Pure Storage, Nimbus Data, and Skyera, will compete not only with each other but with established IT giants as well.

It’s going to be an interesting ride.

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Nimbus Data says Gemini will cut total storage acquisition cost — including software — to $8 per GB from $10 per GB for its current  E-Series product. Company CEO and Founder Thomas Isakovich said one of the chief draws of Gemini, due out in the next 60 days, is its fault-tolerant design that suits it for these mission-critical applications. “This goes beyond the power supplies to non-disruptive capacity expansion, non-disruptive software updates,” he said.

In addition, Gemini’s density should earn it a look by large companies wanting to save data center real estate and energy, he said. “To put it in perspective we’re about 8 times the efficiency of 15K disks. We can fit 1 PB of capacity in a single rack that would take 8 racks and use 10 times the wattage if you used 15K disks,” he said in a recent interview.

This is important as more companies focus “not just on capex but data center opex,” he said, adding: “They’re running out of space and power.” The array also offers software-configurable network interconnects so it can run on Ethernet, Infiniband or Fibre Channel LANs as required.

Analyst Ben Woo, president of New York City-based Neuralytix, said Nimbus Data is in the game to prove that flash is more than a short-term solution. “The fact that they now use interchangeable I/O modules on the back end means companies no longer  have to worry about the networking side, if they change, there’s a new module.”

Priority: proving flash longevity

Vendors like Nimbus have to convince companies that flash can last. Longevity is the “number one risk in an all-flash solution,” Woo said. “Disk drives have a very predictable life, you know when they’ll fail and can do things to mitigate that [but] flash is still a question. Nimbus says they’re taking that to a new level, talking 10 year endurance of their flash,” he said.

Woo also cited the array’s parallel architecture that helps it drive faster throughput.  ”This is an opportunity for them to play against the big boys in media and entertainment who need really fast throughput. Nimbus is doing that through a new set of silicon that helps them drive that performance in a parallel versus a serial manner,” he explained.

South San Francisco-based Nimbus Data already claims some big customers including Bloomberg LP, Wachovia, the State of California,IBM Lucent-Alcatel,  and Stanford University.

Solid-state storage boom continues

Solid state storage is definitely a growing market — researcher IDC expects enterprise flash shipments will grow 20 fold by 2016. But the competition is likewise booming with companies from bootstrapped startups to multi-billion-dollar legacy powers all looking for a piece of that action. Last week alone, startup Skyera emerged from stealth, claiming its new all-flash Skyhawk array will cut native flash costs — before compression and deduplication — to an eye popping $3 per GB. A few days later and at the other end of the spectrum, IBM announced plans to buy Texas Memory Systems, a Houston-based flash pioneer. That deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, is seen as a way for IBM to better compete with storage leader EMC which ponied up a reported $430 million for EXtremeIO earlier this year.

Other entrants include Violin Memory, which just inked  a deal to bring Symantec data management expertise to its arrays, and Pure Storage which recently logged $40 million in Series D funding.

Legacy storage vendors like EMC have touted “tiered” storage — in which companies deploy tape, spinning disks and solid-state or flash memory where each solution is most appropriate. Others like Skyera pretty much tout all-flash-all-the-time.

Nimbus Data’s Isakovich holds a more nuanced view. “Flash can be a lot of places but will not clean the floor. Tape is here, it’s not dying, however we think tiering as it’s done by the big boys is a captive solution and is suboptimal for the user.  We think users will buy fewer tiers because flash is encroaching on high-end disks. People will buy into open tiers, buying best-of-breed for each layer,” he said.

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There is no doubt that flash or solid-state memory is a hot commodity with industry giants like IBM and EMC buying up expertise. EMC purchased XTremeIO last spring for a reported $430 million.

At the same time, startups are attacking the opportunity without legacy strings attached. One of those young companies, Pure Storage, just netted an impressive $40 million in venture capital to pursue its all-flash vision. Skyera, another new entrant espousing all-flash-all-the-time, came out of stealth this week.

These companies are pushing the cost of flash storage down — getting it closer to that of slower but cheaper hard drives. However, as many GigaOM commenters have pointed out, price parity is not there yet. Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze, which offers inexpensive cloud-based data backup, would love to go all-flash but the economics are not there yet, he said but added  they’re getting closer.

IBM said it will integrate Texas Memory flash into its new PureSystems line of converged data center hardware.

Terms of the deal, due to close later this year, were not disclosed.

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Mountain View, CA.-based Pure Storage is one of a handful of companies evangelizing use of solid state storage — which is faster but more expensive than disk storage — nearly everywhere. Many companies, including storage leader EMC, preach a tiered approach, using flash where it makes sense but disks and even tape where that is the more appropriate and cost-effective choice. (EMC itself may be wobbling on this stance, given that it spent a reported $400 million on Israeli flash storage player EXtremeIO.)

Earlier this week, another flash storage startup, Skyera, emerged from stealth with aggressive plans to push the cost of its flash storage systems to an impressive $3 per GB.

As GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham wrote last August, Pure Storage fields impressive management – with founding team members coming from Zimbra, Veritas and Sun Microsystems. Its CEO, Scott Dietzen, is a respected industry veteran who co-founded Zimbra after years at BEA Systems, now part of Oracle.

Pure Storage says it’s shipped more than 100 of its FlashArrays since launching last year. As part of this funding round, Index Ventures senior partner Mike Volpi will join the board.

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Solid-state, or “flash”, storage is hot, hot, hot, hot. A few proof points: Pure Storage just netted $40 million in Series D funding and storage kingpin EMC bought XtremeIO for $430 million last May.

But Skyera claims it’s out-doing Pure Storage, Violin Memory or Nimbus Data and others in making solid-state storage more price competitive with as inexpensive as hard drives and by resolving longevity issues that make IT buyers nervous about adopting the technology. The company claims it can cram 44 TB of storage in a 1u rack that comprises a ground-up-engineered system including the flash controller, RAID controller, storage blades and network interface.

Taking flash mainstream, really

“Competitors got their [native] cost to $7 or $8 per gig and that puts you at the high-end niche level of enterprise applications where IT has to put such a premium on performance they’re willing to pay ten times more than a comparable hard disk system,” Skyera sales VP Tony Barbagallo told me in an interview. “Solid-state storage will not go mainstream at those prices and our goal is mainstream.”

Skyera’s founder and CEO is Rado Danilak, who founded SandForce, a storage technology company LSI bought last year for $400 million. He and his engineering team has a ton of credibility in this arena. SandForce controllers own about 80 percent of the market, according to some estimates.

To get to cheap flash enterprise storage, Skyera uses inexpensive Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash, but found a way to do it to prolong the lifespan of the media.  It is able to use high-density sub-20-nm MLC flash because its controller dynamically adjusts as the medium ages to reduce damage over time.

Putting flash everywhere

The use of consumer-grade flash in enterprise storage is not new.   ”What’s cool here is how much capacity [Skyera] gets in a very small footprint and that they’ve integrated the switching capability right into their array,” said Jim Bagley, senior analyst with Storage Strategies Now, a storage consultancy.

The Skyera team appears to have come up with the next generation of that popular SandForce controller and crafted a huge performance improvement in the process.

Skyera will demonstrate its Skyhawk systems at next week’s Flash Memory Summit. Expect a spate of other flash-related news to come at that event and at VMworld, the following week.

Most storage vendors still talk about using flash judiciously in the enterprise, reserving it for jobs that demand the fastest response. Flash often acts as a “turbo” to an existing storage engine, said Mark Peters, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.  “Skyera is saying:  ’forget that, use solid state for everything.’ The only reason we haven’t done this already is money. It all comes down to price. And, if Skyera has done what it says it’s done on price, this truly is disruptive,” he said.

Fusion-io, a maker of in-server flash, stands at about $11 per GB, Nimbus Data, a Skyera competitor, at about $10 per GB s0 if Skyera can deliver its promised $3 per GB target, it’s a pretty significant cut.

George Crump, lead analyst for Storage Switzerland agreed. “I get asked all the time when flash will take over the data center and the answer is: when it’s the same cost as hard drives.”

If Skyera Skyhawk  lives up to its billing, this is a big step toward that goal. “The next question is if or when they’ll get leapfrogged? We’ll see,” Crump said.

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XtremIO's all-flash storage array

Strategically, the move makes sense for EMC. For one, it has promised an all-flash storage array codenamed “Project Thunder,” and XtremIO is building just such a system right now. Talk about good timing. But there’s more, namely the major focus EMC (which is the majority shareholder in VMware) has put on virtualization and big data going forward.

An all-flash array means faster performance across both virtualized and big data environments. Combined with EMC’s server-side PCI flash product called Project Lightning, which keeps hot data in an SSD cache sitting alongside the processor, that’s one powerful hardware platform for tomorrow’s applications.

Keeping up with EMC means going flash

If EMC does pull the trigger, it wouldn’t be surprising to see other flash dominoes fall in a hurry. NetApp, which is allegedly trying to steal XtremIO out from under EMC, would almost certainly have to answer with an acquisition of its own. HP, Dell, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems — everyone, really — would have to kick their flash plans into gear, too.

The reason is this: flash technology is getting cheaper by the day, and new lower prices points — especially when presented in terms of price/performance — are letting flash-storage startups score a lot of customer wins. But flash for primary storage is kind of like open source software, in that until large vendors pin their futures to a technology, it’s difficult for truly big IT buyers to justify investing too much in it. If that technology goes away tomorrow, the CIO who bought it is out of a job.

EMC dropping half a billion on XtremIO and starting to sell all-flash storage arrays makes justifying a flash purchase a lot easier. But if EMC is the only game in town selling flash arrays, then EMC is the only major storage vendor making money off it. And that can’t happen.

Who’ll get bought

Who’s likely on storage heavyweights’ shopping lists if the EMC-XtremIO deal goes through? I’d say Violin Memory is on the top of that list, with Fusion-io not too far behind. They do different things — Violin is flash arrays whereas Fusion-io does primarily flash cache — but they have both have the mindshare and the tech to pay dividends. Other options — which might come at a lower cost than the highly valued Violin and Fusion-io — are Kaminario, which sells some serious systems chock full of flash and DRAM, and Virident, which competes with Fusion-io on the cache front.

After that, a slew of startups that includes Pure Storage, Nimbus Data Systems, Tintri and Nimble Storage have to look appealing. All of these companies have accumulated impressive customer wins and piles of investor cash, and it’s because they can deliver price-performance gains that, presently, most major storage vendors cannot.

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Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen

With all the excitement around Flash storage in the data center these days, I wasn’t keen to hear about yet another startup that promised to revolutionize SSDs. But with a hot team behind it and the promise to change the economics and infrastructure around storage, I decided to talk to Pure Storage. The company today came out of stealth mode and has raised a $30 million Series C round from Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures with Samsung participating as a strategic investor.

Om covered Pure Storage a few months back, primarily because its founding team comes from Zimbra, Veritas and Sun. Plus it counts as angels, the founders behind VMware and DataDomain — both infrastructure companies that contributed big technologies to enterprise IT. Pure hopes to do the same thing by offering a storage array for enterprises comprised solely of Flash memory. Flash memory provides much faster access to data than hard drives, but is far more expensive. However, Pure CEO Scott Dietzen says the Pure array brings the costs of Flash to lower than $5 per gigabyte, which is less than what a similar product from EMC or NetApp that uses hard drives would cost, and far less than a hybrid product such as what’s on offer from Violin Memory or Nimbus Nimble would.

Pure also introduces a new product category for those interested in Flash –which is just about everyone. While there are plenty of webscale companies deploying Flash memory in servers using products from Fusion-io and even larger players such EMC trying to deploy Flash memory as part of combo storage arrays along with hard disk drives, Dietzen claims Pure offers the first all Flash enterprise-class array, however Nimbus also offers an all-Flash product. He says the cost of using Flash is lower than hard drives because of the software Pure runs to shrink the amount of data stored in memory. Pure combines technologies such as de-duplication and compression to shrink data so a little Flash can go a long way.

Dietzen says the product works especially well for virtualized servers and other enterprise workloads, such as running Oracle databases. Here’s the marketing slide:

But beyond the hype, if Pure can do what it says it can do, it doesn’t just open the door for widespread Flash adoption inside corporate data centers, it flings it open and drags enterprises right on through. And what about those companies such as Facebook currently using the SSDs inside servers either through products like Fusion-io’s or through attached SSDs that run software to make them easily addressable by distributed nodes? Could webscale operators turn toward storage arrays and Pure?

Unsurprisingly, Dietzen believes they could, especially because such an array makes it easier for distributed nodes to access the storage but also because Pure can make Flash so much cheaper than current offerings. I’m eager to see what the rest of the community thinks.

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PURE Storage, according to industry sources, is said to be working on an SSD-drive-based network attached storage and has developed unique software to enhance the performance and dependability of these expensive storage systems.

According to SEC filings, PURE Storage seems to have raised about $25 million in funding, and Silicon Valley sources peg the valuation north of $50 million. It seems the initial funding for the company came from Sutter Hill Ventures, led by Mike Speiser, who was listed as director and an executive officer in the SEC filings.

Speiser is a big believer in the solid state future. The company was using the code name, Os76 Inc. until recently, and was started in 2009 in the offices of Sutter Hill Ventures.

The company has raised $18.4 million of the total $20 million it plans to raise in total as part of its Series B funding. The latest investors in the company include Aneel Bhusri of Graylock Ventures and Mark Leslie, the founding CEO of Veritas.

Dietzen is a good catch for the company, as he has a long history in the software business. He was CTO of BEA Systems, and he joined that company after helping built WebLogic, an app server startup. He was president and CTO of Zimbra, and later joined Yahoo, before helping sell Zimbra to VMware.

Earlier this year, Stacey wrote about the growing number of storage startups, which are all trying to tackle the growing problems of data deluge. Many of these companies are skewing toward using solid state storage and moving away from disks.

Update: I had erroneously referred to Scott at co-founder of Zimbra. Error is regretted and has been corrected.

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