Nimble is hardly playing "Catchup" to EqualLogic or anyone else...
Disclaimer - Nimble Employee, and ex-Dell/EqualLogic employee.
I'm not clear on where you get that Nimble is where EqualLogic was in 2009. EqualLogic in 2012 cannot outperform a single CS-200 series array (never mind the new CS400s and CS-400x2s) and follow their own best practices, even with a million dollar plus 16 array pool. - the performance is THAT much better on the Nimble.
EqualLogic's snapshot capability is so inefficient it's embarrassing - a single 4k changed block will consume 15 MB of non-compressed capacity. By contrast, Nimble's granularity goes down to a single 4k page view. Nimble's model of using efficient snapshotting as a data protection/backup methodology will forever escape them, as their ancient file system and incredibly underpowered processors will not allow it. To fix it would mean abandoning their install base and code and starting over from the basics- then THEY would be where NIMBLE was in 2009...
Replication is even more inefficient on the EQL platform, compared to the WAN optimized, highly granular Nimble model.
EqualLogic did a few things VERY well - they introduced a user administrable, easy to deploy SAN and blazed a trail for iSCSI protocol. Their network stack is very nice. Pity they are selling storage, not networking.
As I said, EQL did a few things very well, and that led to them once being considered the fastest growing storage startup in history. That crown has been moved to Nimble by a LARGE margin - any way you want to measure it - Revenue, number of customers, number of installs, hiring rate... (Hint : The Registers numbers are a bit old - over 1000 installs and 500 customers as of last week).
And about that gateway product - Cacher - well, It was REALLY freaking cool, but there is not not a very large addressable market for super duper high performance NFS.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
