Well this is an interesting and unexpected announcement – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are to purchase Nimble storage. This is in addition to the recent acquisition of Simplivity which is a player in the hyperconverged market.
We already have 3PAR storage arrays at various price points with the current 8200 as the entry level with pretty competitve pricing along with things like StoreVirtual so I certainly didn’t see HPE wanting to add anything else. At this point it is difficult to predict exactly what they will do with Nimble arrays and how they will fit in with the rest of the HPE portfolio. The Simplivity purchase was something I could more easily digest as a stronger move into HCI and of course Simplivity leverages ASICs to deal with storage in the same way as 3PAR so I could understand the appeal.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this development. I’ve looked at Nimble in the past and in fact it was one of the competitors on our last major storage refresh losing out to 3PAR due to it’s inability to meet a number of our core requirements. Will we see a merging of technologies across the Nimble and 3PAR architectures or is this just a way of acquiring a product set which covers a particular price point? I’m sure time will tell and I am certainly interested in what HPE do with the investment.
For reference here is the HPE press release –