three customers on why they chose nimble storage

Three Customers – Why They Chose Nimble Storage Suresh Vasudevan – CEO, Nimble Storage February 19, 2013 – Reposted from www.nimblestorage.com/blog

Context – Nimble Storage Sales Kick-off Meeting

  200+ salespeople and other Nimble Storage staff gathered in San Jose, California the week of Feb. 11th 2013

  Best session in the entire event? –  Three customers presented their

perspectives on how and why they chose Nimble Storage

2 © 2013 Nimble Storage

Three Very Different Customers

  1. The hosting services arm of a large tech consulting organization: –  Delivers hosted Microsoft applications to end customers –  Adds expertise, high availability, ability to manage at scale

»  They host over a million customer mailboxes as a managed service

  2. A regional bank with over a hundred branches in the mid-west: –  Microsoft SQL databases, Exchange, Citrix and Citrix XenApp servers

on virtualized infrastructure using VMware with vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

  3. A leading provider of hybrid (public / private) cloud services: –  Serves mid-market customers via a VMware-based platform –  Leverages their own unified management portal as a differentiator


Key Challenges with Incumbent Storage Systems

  All three customers said they faced similar problems with their incumbent enterprise data storage systems:

–  Inadequate performance –  Cost –  Data management –  Complexity & time


Customer: Application Hosting Company

  Inadequate performance: –  “Met IOPS as long as we chose the right controller initially”

  Cost: –  “Very large footprint resulting in expensive rack charges”

  Data management: –  “Backups with no de-dupe or compression and no easy way

to replicate to alternate site”   Complexity & Time:

–  “Deployment and configuration issues resulted in poor support and have caused delays in customer projects”


Customer: Regional Bank

  Inadequate performance: –  “Incumbent vendor’s performance constraints resulted in

poor user experience” –  “We were out of IO resources and had to do something”

  Cost: –  “Considered … time-consuming and big dollars!”

  Data management: –  “Wanted to modernize with snapshots, replication and SRM"


Customer: Cloud Service Provider

  Inadequate performance: –  “We were in the process of bringing on a new enterprise

customer with huge performance needs”   Cost:

–  “Consolidating multiple data centers”   Complexity & Time:

–  “Could not meet growth plans, client on-boarding was slow”


Thorough Evaluation, Extensive Testing

  Application hosting company: –  Evaluated 6 different storage platforms

»  3 legacy vendors, 2 flash-only start-ups, one other hybrid storage »  Conducted 10,000 mailbox Exchange test over several weeks

  Regional bank: –  Tested us for their database environment –  Migrated all their Citrix XenApp Servers to Nimble Storage arrays

during the proof-of-concept process given the performance headroom   Cloud service provider:

–  Tested us for a large telecom client hosting large databases with heavy input/output (IO) loads


The Resulting Deployments

  Application hosting company: –  Deployed 7 Nimble arrays for a total capacity of

approximately 280TB across two locations   Regional bank:

–  Deployed approximately 70TB across a production and disaster recovery (DR) site

  Cloud service provider: –  Deployed over 300TB across 9 Nimble Storage arrays


Compelling Benefits

–  Cost reductions –  Performance –  Data protection –  Simple management –  Support experience


Cost Reductions – Application Hosting Company

  Removed the incumbent system – 300 drives   Replaced it with two Nimble Storage arrays – 8 SSDs (solid

state drives) and 24 high-density HDDs (hard disk drives) –  Two racks of competitor’s products superseded by just 6U of

Nimble Storage arrays

  Saved $10,500 a month just on data center and rack space charges

  The capital cost reductions were even more significant


Cost Reductions

  Regional bank: –  Save significantly on rack density and capital costs –  Compression alone was able to reduce the data footprint

of their databases by a factor of 3   Cloud service provider:

–  Capital cost of the combined Cisco + VMware + Nimble solution was 50% lower than the alternative

–  Provides additional savings through compression and lower monthly rental charges


Performance

  Regional bank: –  Saw much improved ESX boot times –  Now able to host not just the databases but also migrate

Citrix XenApp servers given the high performance   Cloud service provider:

–  Able to eliminate all of the extensive tuning that they had to do in the past to achieve the performance needed for their clients


Data Protection

  Application hosting company and regional bank: –  Both have implemented a data protection scheme that

leverages local snapshots and remote replication coupled with VMware SRM

  Application hosting company: –  Integrating Nimble snapshots into CommVault’s backup

application –  Their customers can create almost instantaneous backups,

and are able to recover rapidly in the event of a problem


Simple Management

  In every instance, our customers commented on how much simpler it was to manage a Nimble environment:

–  Both in terms of initial deployment as well as on a day-to-day basis


Outstanding Support Experience

  Through our remote support automation, we have the information we need to solve all the problems fast

  We care deeply enough to solve issues, even when they are outside our domain

  We do not let issues fester and we marshal the internal resources needed to address a problem quickly


three customers on why they chose nimble storage

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