1。So why don't you tell us where you think the markets are at with storage to start?
该存储市场估计为$ 33B（系统支出不包括存储软件和服务），目睹了Flash作为新的持续存储介质的到来所驱动的巨大变化，并补充了HDD传统上在企业存储系统中扮演的独家角色。
几十年来，HDD在帮助解决企业的数据增长方面取得了不错的成绩，因为它们的密度稳定增长，从而有助于越来越多地存储越来越多的数据。但是，基于HDD的存储系统做得不好的地方是成本效益满足应用程序性能需求。这是因为尽管HDD的密度有所提高，但在过去的十年左右的时间里，它们的IO性能一直保持不变，结果存储系统必须过度提供HDD以符合应用程序的性能需求。因此，传统上，企业存储系统擅长于具有成本效益的能力或性能，但并非同时提供。
Flash更改了此方程，并且是HDD的完美补充。Flash非常擅长提供性能，并且在成本效益上交付能力方面非常差，而HDD擅长提供容量，但不擅长提供性能。通过将两者结合到单个体系结构中，可以从根本上改进存储经济学 - 设计良好的混合存储系统可以将满足应用程序的性能和容量需求的资本成本降低60-80％！
在接下来的几年中，我们认为将发生大规模的转变，其中占所有网络存储的70％以上的模块化磁盘存储系统将被闪存优化的混合存储系统所取代Flash SSD和低成本，高密度的HDD。
2.您仍然在云中看到电器或更多的电器增长吗？
The simple answer is that both will grow. Appliance demand continues to grow quickly as customers deploy private clouds, but even public cloud deployments可以利益设备需求。
当使用“云”一词时，我们经常考虑平台提供商，例如亚马逊和Google，它们确实取代了产品制造商出售的设备，因为它们建立了自己的基础架构。但是，还有另外两种云服务提供商最终会继续推动对设备的需求。首先，SaaS公司大多最终将最终用户，中小型企业甚至消费者的需求汇总到企业基础设施和设备中。其次，托管公司传统上用来租用机架空间，电源和冷却的公司正在积极迁移其业务模型到租用虚拟机（以及所有服务器随附的服务器，网络和存储设备）或租用虚拟台式机或租用基础设施 -因此，推动对设备的需求。
The key difference though is that these service providers are looking for dramatically more efficient appliances. In fact, service providers are one of our增长最快的客户段仅仅因为我们大大降低了他们的资本成本，并缩小了他们部署的东西的占地面积，这反过来又降低了其功率和冷却成本。
3.您认为谁是最大的存储竞争对手，为什么？
在仅两年半的运输产品中，我们安装了1,100多个客户和2,000多个部署的基础。我们最常遇到的存储供应商（占参与度超过80％的供应商）是（i）EMC，其中端VNX产品；（ii）与FAS产品线的NetApp；（iii）戴尔（Dell）具有等效性和强制产品线。此外，当我们与这些产品线竞争时，我们越来越多地与这些产品竞争，因为它们配置为包括Flash SSD和HDD，而不是仅磁盘的配置。
4.您的产品有什么区别和增值？
There are five areas where we deliver substantial value relative to competitors, even when competitive products are configured to include flash SSDs and HDDs.
- 3-5x性能和容量效率。通常，为了符合企业应用程序的性能和容量需求，我们的存储系统要求竞争产品所需的硬件约25％。这种效率源于我们的软件体系结构，该软件架构能够通过将随机写入从应用程序转换为顺序写入磁盘上的随机写入性能，并通过智能缓存可缓存的SSD数据来更好地读取性能。此外，该系统具有非常有效的效率，因为它使用低成本的HDD并采用内联数据降低来进一步降低容量成本。
- 卓越的数据保护。除了存储主要的应用程序数据外，我们的软件体系结构还有助于沿主要应用程序实例存储数百至数千个集成的de删除和压缩备份（快照）。此外，客户可以通过WAN链接复制应用程序数据以进行灾难恢复，同时最大程度地减少通过内置WAN优化所需的带宽。快照和复制的组合使客户能够大大改进其数据保护，结果，由于中断而恢复的危险较小，如果发生中断，则恢复速度更快。
- Scale-to-fit. Our products are unique in that our customers can scale our products much more flexibly and in more granular increments than any other product in our industry - all without disrupting applications. If customers need more performance without needing more capacity, they can scale an existing Nimble system to upgrade controllers or increase the ratio of flash to disk in the system non-disruptively, without having to change the overall system capacity. In a similar manner, if customers need to increase system capacity but not the performance, they can do so by just adding incremental HDD-based enclosures. This ability to scale granularly and non-disruptively is unparalleled in our industry.
- Administrative Simplicity and Hypervisor/Application Integration. One of the most common benefits that our customers repeatedly rave about is the ease of managing a Nimble environment, which stems from two areas. First, our systems are very simple to setup and manage on a day-to-day basis, since we designed to meet the needs of an IT generalist rather than assume a storage specialist as the administrator. Second, we have invested heavily in building deep application and hypervisor integration out of the box so that is much easier to integrate our products into a broader eco-system
- Remote support automation. We have a unique approach to how we support our customers. By monitoring our customer-deployed systems remotely from our support center on a real-time basis, we are able to know when a system has a support incident at almost the same time as our customer. Further, by gathering millions of sensor values that give us an in-depth understanding of how our customer-deployed systems are performing, we are able to predict and prevent a large number of support incidents before they occur.
5. Will we one day see move into new markets or vertical?
The addressable market we serve today is well over $10B, and while we are growing extremely fast, most of our opportunity lies ahead of us. Consequently, we have no plans to move into new markets in the next few years.
我们被部署到的最常见的工作负载包括数据库，邮件部署，虚拟桌面基础结构（VDI），文件服务和SharePoint部署。这些工作量对于跨职业的公司来说是共同的，因此，我们倾向于在各种垂直市场中部署 - 金融服务公司，制造公司，高科技公司，律师事务所和其他专业服务公司 - 我们所有人都有数百个客户这些垂直市场。
6.您在哪里看到产品扩展到下一步，或者您将添加到当前产品中？
Startups often launch an initial product that they then rapidly evolve based on feedback from early adopter customers. We realized that such a strategy would not work in a mature market like storage where the minimum bar for a complete product offering has been established by very mature and very large vendors such as EMC and NetApp. While we are very differentiated on our core capabilities, our rapid pace of customer adoption is also because we have quickly established parity on a range of features that are typically only to be found in mature products that have been around for a decade or so.
以此为背景，我们还将继续大量投资于扩大我们的功能集。我们继续投资的一些领域包括持续扩展平台，以进一步扩展我们的价格绩效优势，更深入地集成到应用程序和管理程序环境中，从而进一步增强了我们已经差异化的数据保护方法等。
7.我知道许多客户想听听您的产品与其他供应商竞争的地方。
我们目标的存储市场细分市场通常由模块化中端系统提供。更具体地说，超过90％的竞争活动是针对EMC VNX，NetApp的FAS产品，Dell Compellent，Dell Equallogic和HP 3PAR产品的。
我们将近90％的存储系统连接到虚拟化服务器，我们经常看到的工作负载是数据库工作负载，Microsoft Exchange，Virtual Desktop基础架构，文件服务和Microsoft Share Share Point部署。
8. Do you see consolidation in the marketplace or more companies starting up in this space?
这两个因素在以下意义上同时发挥了作用。
- 如果您查看随着时间的推移市场份额，EMC和NetApp都以系统上丢失份额的服务器公司的牺牲而获得了份额，因为越来越多的存储市场已被网络存储而不是直接附加的存储。
- 同时，在被较大的供应商收购之前，初创企业始终证明了能够交付创新并迅速发展成重要存储公司的能力。从这个意义上讲，似乎新的数十亿美元存储产品线主要是由能够比大型公司更好的创新创业创建的。
在过去的五年中，有超过3-4二个存储初创公司，所有这些都是以固态存储为前提的，这是一种破坏性现象，现任公司将无法像接地设计一样快速或有效地利用地面设计，而无需蚕食其现有的现有其现有的设计。产品。虽然确实有很多（如果不是大多数）这些初创公司将无法随着时间的推移作为独立实体维持，但我也坚信，下一组数十亿美元的产品线将源于新的进入存储市场的新参与者。
9.您现在在世界上大部分销售额，您是否看到新兴市场的增长？
A majority of our revenue is derived from the US today, although we have expanded quickly over the last 2 years. We now have sales presence and hundreds of customers around the globe - in Canada, UK, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Scandinavia, BeNeLux, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Philippines and in China. We continue to expand our global presence with new locations every quarter, with emerging markets as an area of focus as we look ahead at the next 12-18 months.
10.让我们谈谈云，您现在在云中做什么？
Our biggest area of focus as it relates to the cloud is in serving cloud service providers as a customer segment. This segment has been one of our fastest growing segments. While our ability to deliver 3-5 times better price performance, better data protection and simplicity appeals to service providers, one of our unique attributes is that our systems can be scaled very granularly in low-cost increments, non-disruptively as workloads change - from a very small initial foot-print to very large-scale deployments - we term this scaling ability as Scale-to-FitTM值。This allows service providers to stage their investments and mimic an on-demand procurement model which in more in line with an on-demand payment model that they experience from their customers.
我们利用云的第二个领域是我们如何提供支持以及客户如何管理其敏捷的存储部署。我们以近实时的时间来监视所有客户部署的系统，并每天收集数百万个读数，然后使用大数据分析来分析以预测支持问题。我们还使用此数据来提供基于云的管理软件，以便我们的客户可以使用浏览器从任何位置监视其全局存储环境。
11.您如何看待SDN以及您的公司适合该新的流行语。
从狭窄的意义上讲，SDN将帮助我们并帮助我们的客户成熟。如果SDN可以根据所提供的应用程序确定存储流量的优先级，则将进一步提高存储性能。