Nimble claims price is right for resellers on flash

Storage vendor Nimble Storage has announced the launch of its first entry-level all-flash solution, which it claims will let partners beat their competition on price and capabilities.

The entry-level product, the AF1000, is priced at under $40,000 (£30,736), and comes with three years' support. Gavin Cohen, head of product marketing at Nimble, said that while other storage vendors aim for that price point, the products do not normally come with support.

"The unique thing about this entry-level product is there is nothing entry level about it. As much as it is a low-cost system, it is a full-featured member of the family. You can scale it up without any disruption to production. That scaleability at entry level is unprecedented," he said.

"It is in no way feature crippled or feature reduced. Most entry-level products are in some way feature limited; we have not done that. It fits almost anywhere in the market: we see the requirement for a lower price point at the low end of the market all the way up to enterprise."

Nimble claims to do 100 per cent of its sales through the channel, and the AF1000 is already available to all partners.

Cohen said the AF1000 is a high-volume product and he believes it will be easy for partners to sell because of its lower price point.

"It is very attractively priced," he explained. "From a channel perspective, this space is competitive. It gives them the opportunity to go in with an aggressive price that some other vendors are going in at, but with a more capable, feature-rich and scaleable solution."

Nimble has plans to keep growing aggressively, according to Cohen. He said that the vendor has seen the most growth in its cloud service provider business, with 20 per cent of its sales coming from this sector.

"That is like a channel in its own right because cloud providers are buying systems from us in order to on-sell it to their customers, and we see a lot of resellers becoming service providers," he added. "We are a real growth company; the company is really centred on growing aggressively. There is no other company our age that has this many customers and has so broadly penetrated."

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• Strategy