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
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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
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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
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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”
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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"
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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”
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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
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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
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Compelling Benefits
– Cost reductions – Performance – Data protection – Simple management – Support experience
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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