Keating Muething & Klekamp Achieves More Than 10X IOPS for vSphere

NexGen
Storage, Inc. announced its n5 Series storage system has been deployed by Keating Muething & Klekamp PLL to meet
its high performance IT requirements and to guarantee response times for
its mission – and business-critical applications.

The NexGen n5 system supports KMK Law’s vSphere environment plus its key
legal applications, and was sized to provide sufficient performance to support
the firm’s transition to VDI over the coming year.

With n5-150, KMK Law achieved:

• More than 10X the available IOPS of its previous solution
• A 70% reduction in rack space with double the capacity of the previous solution
• Increased lawyer and staff productivity
• Sufficient capacity and performance to support its key legal and operational
  applications on a single storage system and to accommodate future growth
  requirements, including a planned VDI deployment

"We
can get half a terabyte of data dropped in our laps on any given day. Our previous
system couldn’t meet our performance needs so we looked into a variety of
solutions including by HP 3PAR, HDS, Pure Storage, Violin Memory,
Nimble Storage and NexGen Storage," said Rich
Wills, CIO for KMK Law. "NexGen
really stood out. We were impressed with its vision for enterprise storage and
its ability to easily meet our peak IOPS performance needs. What’s more,
NexGen’s Storage QoS feature provides guaranteed performance for the datastores
in our VMware vSphere environment."

KMK Law’s IT group supports more than 50
applications on 90 vSphere-based virtual servers, and manages millions
of files and documents within its litigation support, document management and
e-discovery database systems. The IT group determined that the firm needed
50,000 IOPS to provide the response times its users needed and to phase in VDI
over the next two years. These needs far outpaced the roughly 4,000 IOPS of its
previous two-filer solution. It selected and deployed the n5-150
storage system with two capacity packs, providing a total of 99TBs of high-performance
hybrid storage and 150,000 IOPS, all within a 9U footprint.

"Our
previous 50TB solution took a total of 30U of rack space, while the 99TBs of
NexGen storage take only 9U," added Wills. "It’s fun to show people what we’re replacing our prior solution with –
all of it is being consolidated into three boxes with more capacity and more
horsepower. It’s impressive."

Combining PCIe SSDs
from Fusion-io, Inc. and NexGen’s performance management features
has provided the solution that KMK Law needed to address the requirements of
its users. NexGen’s Storage QoS feature allowed the firm’s IT staff to
guarantee performance for the datastores in its vSphere environment by
assigning a ‘mission-critical’ policy designation. Exchange was also designated
mission-critical, while most other applications will be considered
business-critical. With Storage QoS, the IT group can guarantee the
performance necessary to maintain targeted performance levels for all of the
firm’s applications.

The NexGen system will
support the firm’s planned virtual desktop system when it transitions most
employees to a VMware View-based VDI implementation over the coming year. The platform allows users to consolidate VDI and other high-priority
applications onto a single SAN by isolating workloads using Storage QoS. By
assigning performance levels to each application, IT administrators can ensure
performance never drops below targeted levels.

"Virtualization
stresses storage with highly randomized workloads, the need for low latency,
and the difficulty of maintaining consistent and predictable performance for
critical applications," said Chris McCall, VP of marketing, NexGen. "As exemplified by KMK
Law’s experience, NexGen’s storage systems leverage high performance PCIe SSDs
and industry-leading performance management features to provide the raw
performance and ability to dramatically improve response times for users –
while also enabling significant consolidation and cost savings."

For more information on KMK Law’s
experience, watch its video
interview or read its VMware 2013 blog Affordable
Storage without Sacrificing Performance and its 3
Months Later blog update by James Gunnarson, KMK Law’s system
administrator. The full KMK Law case study is available here.
 
Another end user, the COO at Phenix Energy
Group, highlighted his evaluation of NexGen’s storage in his recently
posted blog, Greenfield
to $75-million monster in three easy months.

Recently named a Product
of the Year winner for enterprise storage systems by Storage
magazine/SearchStorage.com and a 2013 Editor’s Choice winner in the Cloud Storage category by Virtualization Review, n5 Storage System
allows customers to:

• Consolidate VDI and business-critical applications on a single SAN.
• Eliminate storage sprawl.
• Guarantee performance for all applications within a shared storage environment.