Nimble ventures6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() This had worked for Data Domain and early iSCSI leader EqualLogic, and would allow the company to gain strength in the mid-market before attempting to compete directly with EMC and NetApp for the major accounts where they were strongest. From the very beginning Varun and Umesh insisted that Nimble would utilize a channel-driven go-to-market strategy. ![]() Nimble’s next stroke of genius also included a stroke of luck. The implications for customers turned out to be profound. The result was Nimble’s unique log-structured file system, highly tuned to the nuance of Flash media and the key enabler of Nimble’s hybrid (Flash plus Disk plus DRAM plus even as yet undreamed of media) storage architecture. They argued that this fact gave Nimble the opportunity for substantial innovation, at a layer where the large incumbents would be hard-pressed to respond. Varun and Umesh knew from their years of experience at NetApp, Data Domain and elsewhere that the foundation of any storage system is the manner in which data is written to the physical media – the data layout itself, and that this layout was in fact the absolute hardest thing for a storage systems vendor to change. The founding epiphany of Nimble was that Flash Memory had the potential to transform enterprise storage, and that taking full advantage of Flash required a totally different technical approach. Umesh and Varun considered several startup concepts together over the years before finally deciding to take the plunge with Nimble. Umesh is a soft-spoken, incredibly gifted engineer with rare excellence in both high level architecture as well as the details of implementation. It was there that Varun teamed up with virtuoso technologist Umesh Maheshwari. FastForward was acquired relatively quickly by Inktomi, the dot-com bubble burst shortly thereafter, and Varun subsequently got back into storage and led development at a string of companies including Data Domain. At FastForward, Varun joined a phenomenal team that subsequently went on to great things around the industry, most notably the formation of Riverbed Technologies (but that is a different story!). Varun had come to FastForward from NetApp, where he was a critical early engineer. I first met Varun when he was VP of Engineering at FastForward Networks, which was one of our portfolio companies at Accel in the late 90’s. ![]() Six years later Nimble became a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, and along the way helped transform an industry. Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari founded Nimble Storage based on an observation at the foundation of data storage – the physical media itself. ![]()
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