Nimble Storage Chosen by The College of Idaho

Both public and private educational facilities are under pressure to create more learning opportunities with technology, and on a reduced budget. The College of Idaho is no different, so it recently deployed Nimble Storage’s SmartStack for business critical applications within its virtualized environment.

As a result, the college increased the performance of business-critical applications and improved its user experience.

It’s the state’s oldest private liberal arts college. The IT team manages the virtualized infrastructure for over 1,200 students and 300 employees. Within its previous IT environment, which consisted of a VMware virtualized environment supported by an HP storage solution, the team suffered severe latency of business-critical applications, including Outlook, a learning management system, an enterprise ERP interface, and various educational applications. At times, it could take users more than 30s to load Exchange emails in Outlook, IT administrators over 6 hours to conduct basic server updates, and over 45 minutes to spin up a VM. With the goal of improving latency and access times, the College embarked on an infrastructure refresh project.

“Our decision to look for a new storage vendor was triggered by the need for increased performance, which after selecting Nimble Storage, has done a complete 180-degree turnaround. Nimble Storage’s CASL architecture increases our overall efficiency, by offering us high-speed performance that meets our capacity demands,” said Alan Price, systems administrator, The College of Idaho and a 2010 graduate.

After researching several vendors, The college deployed Nimble for Business-Critical Applications, a pre-validated environment consisting of a Nimble Storage CS-series array and Cisco UCS blade servers. After the infrastructure upgrade, it has seen performance gains of its business critical applications. End user email now opens instantaneously, and server updates now take place within two hours during the business day with no impact on performance.

“The performance gains have definitely increased the efficiency of our IT team. The fact that we can spin up a VM in less than 5mn, which used to take us over 45mn, is amazing. After our upgrade, implementing new business applications no longer requires significant planning, and the latency problems we once experienced have been replaced by immediate accessibility for employees and students alike,” added Price. “Our main driver for an infrastructure overhaul was performance, and Nimble Storage was definitely the right solution to meet our needs.“