Nimble Storage 'redefines' enterprise storage management

“Our previous legacy storage solution had us caught in a juggling act when managing our VMs,” said Steven Jackson, IT Manager at QUMU, a business video platform provider. “The only way my team and I could keep pace with our organisation’s changing needs was to turn certain VMs on and off to free up IOPS because it was so resource-constrained and severely limited in terms of scalability. InfoSight completely changed our storage management practices by providing full visibility into VM resource consumption, and a single performance dashboard that gives me an instant heads-up when upgrades are imminent. The intelligence behind InfoSight provides all the justification executive management needs to sign off on storage upgrades or expansion.”

Enterprise IT organisations must contend with a number of challenges when it comes to harnessing data growth, while adhering to service level agreements. Adding to these challenges, various aspects of the storage lifecycle management remain reactive, error-prone processes that can lead to downtime or loss in revenue. In contrast to disparate legacy storage management frameworks and tools that generate an abundance of raw data, but aren’t able to synthesise the information into an easily consumable, actionable format, InfoSight integrates, automates, and substantially simplifies storage administrative tasks, ensuring the optimal health of all Nimble Storage arrays.

The InfoSight deep data analytics engine captures and analyses over 30 million data points collected daily from each one of the thousands of installed-base Adaptive Flash storage arrays to provide comprehensive intelligence into overall storage infrastructure health. InfoSight automatically opens more than 90 percent of all support cases, and generates resolutions for over 80 percent of them, saving customers the time and effort of having to drive manual support processes. InfoSight provides intelligent, actionable recommendations to IT organisations on how best to scale storage resources in alignment with changing requirements, all of which is easily accessible from any laptop computer via a single cloud-connected interface.

“We initially chose to go with Nimble’s Adaptive Flash arrays over an expensive upgrade to our existing SAN because it offered far better scalability and was a better fit for our overall cost model. InfoSight proved to be an equally substantial value to us with the time it saves our IT team,” said Alexander Lawrence, Lead System Administrator at Pacific Lutheran University. “At any given time, we’re working on a number of different projects in support of our faculty and students. Gaining both automation and granular visibility into our environment allow us meet end user demands. Both InfoSight and the Nimble arrays fit extremely well with our needs.”

Going Beyond Storage Management with VM-Level Monitoring
In consolidated environments, it is not uncommon for some VM’s to consume a disproportionately high amount of resources, starving other VMs on the same system – leading to what is commonly known as the noisy neighbour problem. With VM-level monitoring, enterprise IT organisations have the ability to optimise workload performance and proactively identify, isolate and address these resource contention issues before service level agreements are impacted. Having the ability to proactively optimise individual virtual machines helps administrators mitigate common pain points that can play havoc with resources in dense storage environments.

“With added VM-level monitoring capabilities, we are able to provide customers a breakthrough platform that gives them complete visibility and control over their storage environments and associated resources,” said Radhika Krishnan, Vice President of Product Marketing and Alliances, Nimble Storage. “Customers who had been utilising legacy solutions had to navigate disparate management frameworks, tools, and interfaces to identify and attempt to resolve potential issues. InfoSight takes the guesswork out of the equation for organisations looking to manage and forecast growth and realise tangible ROI.”