Grant Street Group Consolidates Storage Environment With Nimble Flash Plaform

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced that Grant Street Group, Inc. has selected the its Adaptive Flash Platform to replace its storage environment that consisted of legacy storage along with an all-flash system.

As a result of deploying Nimble’s CS200 and CS700 Series arrays, the Group has realized the performance required to support a mix of workloads, ranging from large-capacity/slow-performance applications to extremely low latency/high-I/O applications, all on a single platform. In addition, it was able to reduce its data center footprint by 50%, and gained the ability to proactively monitor and manage its storage environment.

Grant Street Group develops and administers web sites used by US government entities and financial institutions to conduct auctions and process high-volume, complex financial transactions over the cloud. Utilizing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, the Group provides its clients with access to the latest technologies from any location with Internet access, resulting in saved time, money, and staff resources. Its IT team previously relied on storage solutions from several vendors to support its mixed workload environment, but was unable to find the right combination of products to support the company’s complex environment. The Group’s legacy storage system didn’t provide sufficient performance or capacity, and lacked redundancy; and the all-flash system offered performance, but was unreliable and expensive.

With the decision to upgrade its storage environment, the Group’s IT team focused on the initial purchase price, ongoing support and expansion costs, and the ability to reduce data center footprint and power. Grant Street Group evaluated a number of different vendors’ products that would have required a significant expansion of the company’s data center to obtain the required performance and capacity to scale in line with its requirements. Following competitive evaluations, the Group selected the Adaptive Flash platform to support its mixed workload on a single platform.

“Nimble’s CS700 with the All-Flash Shelf delivers the performance and capacity we need at a much better price point than the all-flash alternatives. Plus, the Nimble CS700 fits in just half the data center footprint and consumes only one quarter of the power of the other systems we evaluated,” said David Hewett, director of information systems, Grant Street Group. “We’ve had upgrade and support issues with our previous storage arrays, but we didn’t have any reservations at all with Nimble. No matter what we’ve thrown at the Nimble platform it handles it extremely well. Nimble is an ideal consolidation platform for us.“

The Group has also benefited from InfoSight, Nimble’s cloud-connected proactive management and support engine that leverages actionable intelligence through the power of sophisticated data sciences, providing visibility into the health and operation of all Nimble Storage arrays.

“Nimble InfoSight is a very powerful management portal,” Hewitt said. “I can look at all of the different statistics on our Nimble arrays and quickly make decisions about moving VMs around to keep us in a nice spot from a latency perspective.“