Grocery Outlet Deployed Two Nimble CS220 Arrays
Eliminating overnight backups and integrating DR
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on April 20, 2011 at 3:09 pmNimble Storage announced that Grocery Outlet has deployed two Storage CS220 arrays, eliminating overnight backups and simplifying disaster recovery.
With Nimble arrays, the retailer has reduced backup times to seconds, overcoming complex weekend backup operations that previously spilled over into Monday business hours. And, with one onsite Nimble array replicating to the second, Grocery Outlet today is assured of disaster-recovery readiness, simplified DR processes, and the ability to perform rapid restores, as needed from the offsite array.
Because the Nimble arrays provide primary and secondary storage on a single device, Grocery Outlet no longer needs to maintain separate primary and backup tiers. The new storage infrastructure has significantly reduced capital costs for storage and operating costs for data backup, restores, and offsite replication, while delivering gains in system performance.
The adoption of Nimble came with the need by the grocery discounter, which maintains over 150 locations in the western United States, to replace an aging iSCSI SAN that had experienced performance degradation and an increase in backup times as a result of growth in data.
The move to Nimble also enabled Grocery Outlet to move away from a traditional storage architecture that stored data as fixed-size blocks. Because a Nimble array stores data as variable-size blocks, the array can provide 50 to 75-percent data compression with no added latency. With Nimble’s zero-copy cloning capabilities, Grocery Outlet today makes multiple copies of databases and with no incremental consumption of storage capacity, reducing cost and speeding up application testing and development.
"Our previous storage architecture made DR too expensive to deploy," said Steve Tuscher, director of IT for Grocery Outlet. "The concept of converged storage and backup – plus the ability to easily replicate to our DR site with a second Nimble array – was irresistible. The Nimble platform is fast, simple, and cost-effective, and we no longer need to maintain our older disk backup devices."
Grocery Outlet also cited Nimble’s use of flash memory for tier-one data as an advantage in accelerating storage and backup operations. "Nimble uses front-end cache for frequently accessed data," said Gordon Yee, senior network manager for Grocery Outlet. "All data resides on spindles, but a big portion is kept in the large flash cache to speed access time for applications that require rapid access and retrieval, such as our Oracle-based financials."
He added that Grocery Outlet recently transitioned its financial system from an Oracle forms-based application to an Oracle .Net-based framework. "From the way the new Oracle application is architected, it absolutely requires Nimble’s solid-state performance."
Plans Include Rollout of Virtual Desktops
Grocery Outlet is now planning to move all of its storage onto the Nimble arrays. Tuscher said that Grocery Outlet will be deploying the Nimble CS220’s snapshot capabilities across all of its applications, eliminating backup windows entirely. Given the cost-effective storage of up to 90 days of snapshots, this allows recovery in the event of data corruption. And, with the use of zero-copy cloning, the Nimble arrays will also be used for the retailer’s implementation of virtual desktops in 2011.
Tuscher added: "It has been a very satisfying experience working with Nimble Storage – both the company and the devices. We don’t have this depth of relationship with every vendor – only with those who have really helped us succeed and who have demonstrable, superior products. We are looking forward to a long-term relationship with Nimble Storage and its industry-changing storage arrays."