City of Pueblo Opts for Nimble Storage All Flash Array

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced that the City of Pueblo, CO selected its storage flash platform to support its centralized IT infrastructure, enhance community services, and ensure public safety.

The City of Pueblo will deploy Nimble AF5000 All Flash array to accelerate its more than 120 applications spanning city-wide departments, including the city’s primary financial system, and the police and fire departments’ 911 call dispatch and record management systems, which rely on the virtualized environment.

The City of Pueblo encountered an app-data gap with its legacy storage infrastructure that was negatively impacting application performance and response times. In an effort to close the app-data gap, the IT team researched 11 storage vendors with offerings encompassing hybrid and all flash storage systems. As a result of its evaluation, the city initially tested the Nimble CS500 Adaptive Flash array alongside products from Pure Storage and Tegile, but ultimately selected an AF5000 All Flash array to address its primary storage requirements.

“We set out to find a solution that provided the performance and scale required to support our 106,000 residents in a timely manner. Public service and safety are issues we take seriously so our evaluation process needed to be extremely comprehensive. This led us to evaluating both all flash and hybrid storage arrays,” said Lori Pinz, director of IT, City of Pueblo. “The performance of next generation storage systems are above and beyond our legacy storage, but there were several factors that led us to selecting Nimble – namely ease of use, InfoSight predictive analytics and the Timeless Storage support guarantee.“

While testing the Nimble CS500 Adaptive Flash array, the City of Pueblo’s IT team was able to migrate applications to the Nimble array with no impact to end users, and obtain a 3X application performance increase. The predictive analytics and reporting provided by InfoSight has enabled the IT team to predict and prevent performance barriers across its business-critical applications, including the latency-sensitive 911 call dispatch application. With InfoSight, the team has been able to identify and address latency hotspots whether they occur in the storage, compute or networking layers of the IT stack. This increased visibility, reduces the time to recover from latency issues and helps to ensure public safety is not compromised.

While obtaining excellent results with the Nimble CS500 and InfoSight, the IT team learned of the AF-Series All Flash arrays, which run the same NimbleOS and provide a lower TCO than competitive all flash arrays. Since the management and functionality are identical, the IT team selected the AF5000 array in place of the CS500 array to support its entire production environment. The AF5000 will host all city-wide applications, including SunGard Public Sector’s ONESolution Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Record Management system, and Tyler Munis and Incode financial and court systems.

“We were pleased to learn that Nimble support and maintenance contracts provide consistent pricing through the life of the contract, including renewals,” said Pinz. “Nimble approached us with a sustainability model that includes not only a five-year warranty, but in the event that we need to push the array to year six or seven due to budget constraints, Nimble will keep us under warranty. We appreciate that Nimble doesn’t increase maintenance pricing or force us to embark on any forklift upgrades.“

The Nimble Timeless Storage business model provides investment protection and upgrade certainty, with an option to receive a free faster controller upgrade after three years.