Every Nimble storage array sent a steady stream of data about its own health back to the company. A cloud service called InfoSight read those streams, spotted problems and told Nimble's support team before the customer saw anything. Nimble's arrays mixed fast flash memory with cheap spinning disks, using a file system it called CASL. Storage costs were rising as companies piled up data.

Flash Plus Disk

Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari founded Nimble Storage in 2008. It showed its first product, the CS200 hybrid array, in July 2010. CASL let customers add speed or capacity on their own, without taking systems offline. Suresh Vasudevan became chief executive in 2011, and Maheshwari became chief technology officer. The bet was that smart software could get high speed out of a mix of flash and cheap disk, and that analytics could catch trouble early.

Bought by HPE

Nimble sold 8 million shares at $21 on December 13, 2013, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as NMBL. It added all-flash arrays in 2016 and struck a partnership with Lenovo that October. On March 7, 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprise agreed to buy Nimble for about $1.09 billion in cash. The deal closed on April 5, 2017, and HPE kept Nimble as a brand.

Cover: Kasuga Deer Mandala, Mandara Shika. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a deer (nimble).