Nimble Storage CEO Suresh Vasudevan on culture and post IPO plans

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Nimble StorageNimble Storage, interview with Suresh Vasudevan
Date: 15 February 2014
Nimble Storage CrunchBase profile

As a part of my CEO series, I interview CEOs of innovative companies in the fields of Storage, Virtualization and Networking.

Nimble Storage was founded in 2008, offering a hybrid storage model that works both with magnetic disk and flash storage. They have been very successful and went IPO very succesfully on December 13 of last year.

I had the pleasure to interview Suresh Vasudevan and learn about his background and gain insights into Nimble’s company culture and post IPO plans.

You are a born Indian and studied there, how did you transition into Silicon Valley and the Storage field?
Suresh VasudevanYes I was born and brought up in India and studied there, then I joined McKinsey consultancy in India. The work was a lot of fun, most of what I did was strategy consultancy which I loved. I then moved for McKinsey to Chicago and the assignments there were considerably less interesting.

(laughing) I was into operations and restructuring of steel plants and paper companies – and so on, which was a lot less exciting then what went on in Silicon Valley at the time.
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Interview with Arun Agarwal, CEO of Infinio

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infinio_logo2Infinio, interview with CEO Arun Agarwal
Date: 23 November 2013
Infinio CrunchBase profile

Infinio
Centralized storage often represents the performance bottleneck of the datacentre stack. The storage array sits far away from the application and has to deal with changing I/O from multiple applications. As a result, latency to a busy storage array is high and performance can be unpredictable.

Moving storage closer to the application is a great way to solve the problem. Server side flash is close to the application and can act as a buffer to steady reads and writes to the centralized storage array.

A barrier to overcome with most solutions, is that customers are required to order hardware and invest in considerable work to perform the installation.

Recognizing these barriers, Infinio differentiates itself by offering a virtual appliance that uses existing server memory to cache reads. To sidestep any remaining organizational barriers, the product can be downloaded and fully tested for 30 days.

I Interviewed Arun Agarwal, CEO of Infinio to find out more about the company and the product.
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Interview with Greenbytes CEO Steve O’Donnell part 2

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GreenBytesGreenBytes, interview with CEO Steve O’Donnell
Date: 26 August 2013
GreenBytes Crunchbase profile

Steve O’Donnell of Greenbytes

On the 21st of August, I interviewed Steve O’Donnell – CEO of Greenbytes. In the first part of the interview I covered the reasoning behind Greenbytes’ move toward 100% software only. In the second part, I asked Steve about his views on the storage market and asked some questions about his personal drive & background.

Some of my questions were inspired by an interesting interview on Techcrunch with Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Bipul Sinha where he explains (jump to 02:00) that in his view, the best startups offer a disruptive solution that fits into an existing structure that the customer is already using. He convincingly explains how flash virtualization startup Pernix Data fits those parameters, but left some question marks in explaining how Nutanix (also in his portfolio) meets those requirements.

I have been interested to hear the views on converged technologies and how disruptive technologies can be made to fit customers’ existing infrastructure. Steve has interesting views on these points that shine through in this second part of the interview.

How do you view the converged technologies like Nutanix, Simplivity and upcoming ConvergentIO?

Steve O'DonnellI think they’re great and the obvious way forward. The market is going toward services, toward fully integrated solutions. At Greenbytes we are seeing that customers are buying fully integrated virtual appliances for VDI that work. Working with our partners we deliver that kind of integrated solutions. Nutanix, Simplitivity are great. Except, they’re still the ancklebiters, the little guys – who’s going to win is the big guys.
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Most interesting niche within Software Defined Datacenter space?

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This question I posted on “Ask a VC Series” where Bipul Sinha was invited. Bipul Sinha is partner at Lightspeed Ventures where he currently invests in Nutanix, Pernix Data, Bromium and Peel.

Considering his portfolio and feel for the Software Defined Datacenter space I was curious to know what he considered to be the most interesting niche within SDD. Bipul regards management of the software defined datacenter stack to be very important and motivates that in the below video.
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