Flash has permeated enterprise storage in small, medium-sized, and large enterprises as well as
among webscale customers like cloud and service providers. It is available in a variety of different
system architectures, including internal storage, hyperconverged and converged platforms, and shared
storage arrays. Revenue driven by shared storage arrays, of both the hybrid flash array (HFA) and the
all-flash array (AFA) type, is much larger than from other segments today and will continue to dominate
enterprise storage spend through at least 2020. Customers purchasing flash-optimized shared storage
arrays prize them for their performance, enterprise-class data services, and the efficiencies of
centralized management. As the flash-optimized array market has matured, it is becoming increasingly
clear that vendors that can offer a range of flash-optimized options, including both HFA and AFA
platforms, are better able to meet the wide range of customer requirements than those vendors that
can only offer one or the other. Vendors that share a common management environment and use a
common set of data services across their HFA and AFA solutions bring significant management
advantages to the table, giving customers more options to cost-effectively meet their performance and
capacity requirements across a range of enterprise storage workloads. Nimble Storage has been one
of the more successful HFA vendors over the past six years, with well over 8,500 customers across
Fortune 5000, service providers, and midsize enterprises, and in early 2016, it entered the AFA market
with a very competitive offering that runs the same, mature Nimble OS as the company's proven HFA
platforms. As customers consider how best to leverage flash in their general-purpose storage
infrastructures, overarching strategic objectives must be considered.