Law Firm Howard Rice Adopting Nimble CS240

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced
that law firm Howard Rice has reduced its TCO for enterprise storage with the adoption of the Nimble CS240
converged storage and backup array.

The law firm, which has seen both its
unstructured data and cumulative data storage grow at over double-digit rates
per year, cites the capacity optimization of the CS240 as the key factor in
controlling storage costs, even while driving performance gains in
access to its Microsoft SharePoint data stores.

Howard Rice stores "key discovery data,"
comprising information and images about cases currently in litigation, using
Microsoft SharePoint and file shares containing more than 4.5 terabytes of
active-case information and significantly more inactive case information
residing in near-line storage. With the amount of unstructured data burgeoning,
that challenge had become problematic, and yet the data had to be rapidly
accessible by lawyers and easily manageable by storage administrators. For
Matthew Reynolds, CIO at Howard Rice, this need called for a new approach to
managing the growing terabytes of corporate data in his charge and a
better solution for managing TCO.

Reynolds found the solution in the CS240.
Nimble’s Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture, featuring
inline compression, thin snapshots and flash-accelerated performance, provided
Howard Rice the capacity and performance edge it required. "We knew there
was quite a lot of duplication in our SharePoint repositories and unstructured
file shares, and we were looking to take advantage of the capacity optimization
that Nimble promised. When we parked our data on the Nimble array, the initial
results were impressive. Virtually immediately, we began to see considerable
reduction of storage in our unstructured data, which consists of files in many
native formats used in legal cases."

Designing Storage for Efficiency
Reynolds found the new regimen for managing SharePoint data
to be a natural fit for Nimble. "Our SharePoint environment is highly
read-only," he said.

With growing amounts of published data, his team has leveraged the Nimble array’s SSD technology to maximize speed of
data access. The firm also uses the CS240’s zero-copy cloning capacity, which
enables entire storage volumes to be cloned with no requirement for additional
storage.

Reynolds and his team had already virtualized their
SharePoint environment, and the move of SharePoint data to Nimble has set the
stage for a longer-term approach to virtualization. Reynolds’ team found that
the CS240’s graphical user interface made storage setup for
virtualized servers a routine operation.

With offsite storage serving as the company’s
disaster-recovery repository, Reynolds also faced the challenges of replicating
the firm’s key discovery data. Moving to the Nimble CS240 has overcome issues
the firm had experienced with a disk-to-disk data replication solution.

With
one CS240 now replicating to another offsite CS240, Reynolds calls initial performance
numbers "impressive and promising."

"I had a pretty good idea that the performance would be
as good as the platform was innovative," he said.

With the aid of the Nimble CS240, Howard Rice today runs its
storage operations on a lower budget compared to its former
storage systems, but with the same reliability and higher performance.
With budget and performance in line with the firm’s demanding requirements,
Howard Rice is now rethinking its virtualization strategy. As the firm makes
the move to either of the industry’s most popular virtualization platforms,
VMware or HyperV, the Nimble CS240 will support the move.

Flash-Based Architecture
Nimble Storage’s CS-Series is based on the company’s
patent-pending architecture, Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL), which
enables fast inline data compression, intelligent data optimization leveraging
flash memory and high-capacity disk, instant optimized backups, and
WAN-efficient replication – all in a single device. CASL allows organizations
to reduce their capital expenditures for storage and backup by at least 60
percent, while eliminating the need for separate, disk-based backup.