April 28, 2015
One of the biggest issues storage administrators and IT directors face today is figuring out how much storage their organization will need over the next 3 to 5 years.
With today’s exploding data growth (some analysts say that over 60% of the world’s data has been created in the last 5 years) and unknown application demands, it’s a complicated and risky endeavor for IT leaders to submit capital budgets that are spot on. It’s almost impossible to purchase exactly what you need, making it a ‘damned if you do/damned if you don’t’ scenario. If you over estimate your storage capacity needs, the organization spends more money, wasting valuable resources. On the other hand, if you under estimate storage capacity you’ll need to explain why the company now needs to spend more money than anticipated or budgeted.
Why Nimble Created Storage on Demand (SoD)
Through customer feedback, Nimble understood the challenges customers face when procuring storage hardware for the cloud market. Bottom line, customers are frustrated with trying to predict storage utilization over a 3-5 year period and having to pay for it upfront. Whether or not their storage prediction is accurate, the vendor walks away with their money.
Nimble Storage on Demand Addresses Key Customer Concerns
Business Model Alignment
Pay for storage the same way you get paid. Nimble is only successful if you’re successful.
Mitigate Risk
No more capex – nor is this a glorified leasing scheme with looming balloon payments.
Adjust for Change
Once the storage is deployed and paid for there’s flexibility to adjust capacity and performance.
Achieve Flexibility
Pay as your grow, and grow as you need it. You’re not locked into long-term agreements. With Nimble Storage on Demand (SoD) you can change your storage as your requirements change.
Is Nimble Storage on Demand right for you?
Nimble’s Storage on Demand is the industry’s first pay-for-use pricing model for onsite storage. It gives you the flexibility and cost effectiveness of cloud storage solutions with the security of having your storage onsite and under your control 24×7.
Other on demand solutions may have catches like locking you into inflexible long-term contracts. Nimble’s Storage on Demand provides a simple and flexible utility pricing model that only bills you for the storage you use, whether it goes up or it goes down. Additionally, you’re not locked into a long-term contract that wastes capacity and money. If after 12 months your requirements change and you no longer need this solution, you can easily cancel the contract with no penalty, or if you aren’t sure how long you need SoD, continue with a flexible month-to-month agreement.
How Nimble Storage on Demand Works
You start by selecting one of four service levels ranging from a Platinum High Performance option to a Bronze option, which provides extremely cost-effective capacity. With Nimble, you always get the capacity you need plus a 10% additional buffer. And Nimble comes out and installs your solution for free.
The most unique thing about Nimble’s Storage on Demand offering is that you decide where to physically store the hardware – it doesn’t just exist somewhere in the ‘cloud.’ You can install the Nimble array onsite within your data center or private cloud, within a hardened colocation facility, or you can even connect to a Cloud provider that you are currently working with.
Once you’re up and online, Nimble’s innovative Infosight Monitoring Solution manages the environment. InfoSight is Nimble’s Cloud-based management portal and analytics engine that constantly monitors your storage system’s health and storage use within the array.
Why InfoSight is Important
Ensure a reliable data protection strategy
- InfoSight can alert you if something is wrong at multiple levels – array unprotected, array snapshot failures, VMware snapshot failures, replication failures
- Dashboard view confirms that everything is working at any time
Pinpoint infrastructure problems
- Pattern matching and correlation has found issues such as bad NICs and cables, sometimes before customers even knew there was a problem
Predict availability issues
- Debugging software anomalies often requires vendor lab work or attempt to reproduce the customer environment, taking weeks or months to find, fix, and roll out a patch
- InfoSight’s analysis found such an issue in a day and was able to predict which customers would be affected and when. Customers are proactively notified of the issue and how to fix it
Find the performance bottleneck
- Workload data feeds detailed systems models to generate recommendations on how to improve performance, so recommendations are based on customers’ actual workload
Billing
Infosight continually monitors your usage. In the event of unexpected growth in storage, and the buffer drops below 10%, Nimble will ship additional capacity automatically without you getting involved. At the end of each month you’re billed based on your actual storage usage, regardless of whether your usage has gone up or gone down.
Reap the Benefits of Nimble’s CASL File System
Another advantage is that you reap the benefits of Nimble’s CASL software with the storage on demand solution, just as if you were a pure premise-based solution. Essentially this means zero compromise from a technical capabilities or feature standpoint, unlike other cloud-based solutions.
In my earlier blog “7 Key Differentiators Explain Why the Nimble CASL Architecture Continues to Disrupt the Storage Industry” I outlined the benefits of Nimble’s CASL Architecture. Below is a graphic summary of the technical advantages of the Nimble File System at a high level.
One Final Advantage – Nimble Owns the Gear
Even though the physical array is on-premise with a cloud-like pricing model, you don’t actually own the gear – Nimble does. This is advantageous because you no longer have a depreciating asset on your books. As a customer under this offering, you always have the latest and greatest technology that Nimble has to offer, which is definitely not the case in the traditional capital purchase model.
Are you interested in taking advantage of the latest storage offerings but aren’t sure how much storage you’ll need or are hesitant to pay for it all upfront? Contact a Mindsight Solutions Architect to discuss Nimble’s Storage on Demand offering and to determine if it’s a good move for your organization.
Like what you read?
About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT consultancy and services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We’ve always prided ourselves in delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from design and implementation to support and management. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for a local business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
