Nimble Storage will make its debut tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange at an opening price of $21 per share. The hybrid storage provider will offer 8 million shares and raise an expected $168 million.

The company had previously filed to offer the same number of shares at a range of $16 to $18. The company has had steep growth over the past year and is on a run rate to top $100 million of revenues this fiscal year. As of October 31, the company had revenues of $84 million. In the 2012 fiscal year, revenues were $53.8 million. It has $30 million in losses, up from $27.9 million last year.

The company has to date raised $81.7 million. its largest shareholders are Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Lightspeed Ventures.

Nimble is one of the fastest-growing storage companies in the market. It uses flash storage on top of the hard disk with multi-core processors to compress data in real-time. The layer of flash acts as cache, giving the customer high I/O. It has space efficient snapshots, similar in a way to Apple Time Machine, which continually backs up the data as it is processed. It allows customers to store 60 to 90 days of snapshots on the storage box. The technology is designed to combine primary, backup, and disaster recovery.

Companies such as Boulevard Brewery use Nimble to reduce their amount of storage capacity. It competes with vendors such as Dell, EMC and NetApp.

Nimble looks like it will have a decent IPO — far better than Violin Memory, a storage company that has seen its stock price decline rapidly since its debut in September at $9 per share, down 20 percent in the first day of trading. The stock ended trading today at $2.53 per share.

Update: Nimble Storage had originally said the price of its IPO would be set between $18 and $20 per share. Tonight they set the price at $21 per share to raise $168 million.

(Feature image courtesy of Paul L Dineen on Flickr via Creative Commons)