Mohler, Nixon & Williams Deploying Nimble Storage

Nimble Storage announced that Mohler, Nixon & Williams (MNW), one of the 100 largest accounting firms in the United States, has deployed the CS240 converged data storage, backup and disaster recovery platform and is in the process of integrating Nimble Storage into its storage, backup, and disaster plans.

The firm identified rapid backup times, significant reduction of tapes necessary as a backup medium, and efficient offsite data replication for disaster recovery as advantages of the Nimble platform. After just its initial phase of deployment, MNW has reduced backup times for Microsoft Exchange email.
 
With system backups initiated after hours on Fridays, MNW found the process extending into Monday business hours prior to installing the Nimble array. With ever-growing stores of corporate email to manage, Microsoft Exchange backups were a special challenge. To slash backup times, Information Systems Director Craig Condie first moved the company’s email stores to the Nimble system and initiated a regimen of continuous replication and frequent data snapshots, which streamline access to stored data and accelerate data recovery.
 
With an effective email snapshot process in place as an alternative to traditional backup, Condie and his team, with a few days of effort, reduced overall system backup windows by 60 to 75 percent. With plans to connect all department servers and shared volumes to the Nimble CS240, Condie estimates that company-wide backup windows will shrink even further. In addition, since moving Exchange to Nimble, previous user complaints about slow email performance have disappeared.
 
MNW benefits from its ability to cost-effectively store up to 90 days of snapshots on a single, converged-storage-and-backup device:  implementing frequent snapshots allows the firm to significantly cut the use of tapes for backup. For Condie, the downside of tape is the time required to create, manage, and store tapes offsite, the delays in retrieving tapes when they are needed, and the risk of failure that is inherent in the technology. "I’ve been in the industry 30 years and tapes are always problematic. The large capacity of the Nimble CS240, along with its tight integration with Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange, allows us to completely rethink the backup process, significantly reducing complexity and costs associated with data protection."
 
At the same time, the architecture of the CS240 enables taking storage snapshots much more frequently than with traditional storage systems, making snapshots throughout the day both easy and economical.

For Condie, the benefits were immediate: "There was an instance in which a user mistakenly deleted a file from the server the very day it was created. In most scenarios, there would be no backup from which to recover the file. But our backup administrator was able to jump onto the Nimble dashboard, retrieve the previous snapshot, and copy the file to the server. The process was quick and routine."
 
With a streamlined backup regimen in place, MNW has turned its attention to enhancing its disaster recovery processes. Condie plans to replicate primary storage data offsite to a second Nimble array. "We foresee significant savings in time, effort and cost as compared with our current solution."
 
The new efficiencies afforded by the Nimble system have allowed his staff to turn their attention to server virtualization. Condie’s team plans to virtualize critical applications, starting with Exchange email, as a key component in the firm’s disaster recovery plan. In the event of a disaster, he said, the firm will simply bring up a virtualized server, with no requirement to rescue the downed physical server. "Having our applications virtualized and our application data always available on offsite primary storage will allow us to minimize the downtime, cost and risk associated with a disaster."