A challenging time for Flash?

“Our organisation was looking for all-flash performance and capacity efficiency for various workloads, including our SQL environment. We were struggling with capacity sprawl due to the number of database copies we keep. Our requirements led us to a proof of concept with both Pure Storage and Nimble,” said Michael Pettit, Senior Systems Administrator at CareOregon, a managed healthcare company. “We selected Nimble because their platform offered us the performance we needed while giving us 5x the usable capacity. We now have a single storage platform for all of our applications and workloads.”

An expanding perception in the storage industry is that IT organisations, specifically within large enterprises, running high-performance applications such as transactional databases or virtual infrastructures need to evaluate all-flash storage systems in order to keep pace with expanding bandwidth and IOPS overhead requirements. Flash-only storage systems claim to deliver on performance, but remain cost-prohibitive and ultimately fall short in addressing the capacity requirements of enterprise-wide applications and workloads. When selecting all-flash storage systems for a subset of applications that require high performance and sub-millisecond latency, enterprises are forced to create incremental storage silos that ultimately result in higher cost, complexity and risk for their organisation. Unlike flash-only storage systems, the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform is engineered to meet or exceed performance requirements of enterprise-wide workloads by delivering up to 500,000 IOPS and sub-millisecond latency, while also offering capacity efficiency, superior data protection and radically lower complexity and cost – all within a single platform.

“We were running into resource contention across our virtualised environment, and as a result brought in a well-known all-flash solution vendor as well as the Adaptive Flash solution from Nimble,” said Tige Vollrath, Systems Manager for National Information Solutions Cooperative. “The performance of the two platforms were on par with each other, but what really impressed us was the scalability of the Nimble platform. Whether we need performance or capacity, we can scale at a fraction of the cost of an all-flash platform.”

“We’re glad to say that we took the ‘Flash Challenge’ long before the programme was formalised and we are experiencing high performance at a lower cost than all-flash alternatives,” said David Hewett, Director of Information Systems at Grant Street Group, a leading provider of solutions for high-value online auctions and complex tax collection software. “We manage a mix of workloads, ranging from large-capacity/slow-performance applications, to extremely low latency/high-I/O applications. We evaluated a number of all-flash solutions, focusing on initial purchase cost, ongoing support and expansion costs, and the ability to reduce our data centre footprint from a space and a power perspective. The Nimble Storage CS700 and All Flash Shelf allowed us to consolidate our environment to ease management overhead and decrease our data centre footprint by consuming only a quarter of the footprint of our previous platform. From everything I have learned about storage over the years, Nimble shouldn’t be able to deliver us 125,000 write IOPS from their adaptive flash arrays. I don’t know how Nimble does it, but it works like a dream.”

To launch the global integrated marketing campaign Nimble would like to introduce you to Mary and Harry, two senior IT directors of large enterprises, focused on creating the most efficient and scalable data centre possible for their respective organisations. Mary selected the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform and Harry selected a flash-only vendor. Get to know Mary and Harry and their conflicting experiences through the Nimble Storage marketing campaign that launched today.

Participation in the Adaptive Flash Challenge is open to any enterprise IT organisation that is willing to evaluate an all-flash storage solution side-by-side with the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform. Terms and conditions do apply. For more information on the Adaptive Flash Challenge, visit www.nimblestorage.com.

“Any organisation that is considering flash-only storage products owes it to themselves to take the Adaptive Flash Challenge,” said Dan Leary, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Nimble Storage. “We want these organisations, both large and small, to know that they do not need to create incremental storage silos to realise the performance and capacity required to manage a broad range of workloads – a common compromise brought on by flash-only vendors. We are extremely confident in lining our Adaptive Flash platform up against any of the flash-only vendors in the marketplace.”