At the recent Nimble Adaptive Flash Launch, Nimble announced an evolution of its adaptive flash array, giving companies more options when using a cloud solution for data storage. Not only do adaptive arrays make it easier and faster to access data, they can also be customized so that users only pay for the storage capacity they use.

Varun Mehta, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Nimble, joined Stu Miniman and David Floyer of theCUBE to talk about his company’s philosophy surrounding flash storage.

The path of least resistance

When asked how a company, such as Nimble, can build a feature and sustain it through future growth, Mehta explained that back in 2007 Nimble looked at a few things involving flash. The first was market entry and where the path of least resistance led.

“That was very important and defined our initial product. But then you look beyond the market entry to five to 10 years out; then you say OK, how can I have the largest footprint,” Mehta said. “We were one of the earliest flash companies to get started, and that allowed us to stake out the largest area. We do believe that the combined flash plus disk market is going to be the vast majority of all the storage that is going to be shipping for many years.”

Making a difference in the storage market

Mehta was also asked about how flash could make a difference in the storage market.

“Having flash close to the application is very helpful. It provides data much closer to the application, which is good,” he said. “The problem it doesn’t solve is your resiliency and your data protection problem, because you still have this need to take snapshots for instance, to replicate your data off site. All of these things, these data management functions, which are really hard to integrate into the server, that is why you still need your traditional storage array.”

See Mehta’s entire segment below.