When Storage Capacity Hits the Wall: A Tale of Two Organizations

Without upgrades and enhancements, nearly every company at some point reaches the natural limits of its IT infrastructure. That threshold seems to hit sooner rather than later when it comes to storage, thanks to escalating volumes of data and increasing workloads.

To avoid capacity problems and ensure continued business growth, it’s critical to modernize storage infrastructure. Here’s how two different organizations reached that conclusion and the paths they took toward upgrading.

A Lesson in Scale

Mesa Community College (MCC) in Arizona enrolls more than 40,000 students each year. Like many organizations, its IT environment included multiple systems from multiple vendors, and the college has a lean IT staff to manage it all.

“It took a lot of time to manage all of the different platforms, and it wasn’t easy to scale the environment to meet demands,” said Sasan Poureetezadi, CIO of MCC. “Out of necessity, we have moved from this disparate model to standardize on fewer platforms to reduce our costs and simplify management.”

MCC chose to standardize on HPE Nimble Storage, focusing on adaptive flash arrays based on the college’s need for performance, ease of management, scalability, and value.

“With Nimble, our IT admins are no longer plagued by the disparate storage infrastructure,” Poureetezadi said. “We can add more storage or reconfigure capacity on the fly while our systems are in production.”

And the business value is significant. Since the change, MCC says it has:

• Achieved a 5x increase in application performance
• Reduced its data center footprint
• Decreased IT admin time managing infrastructure by two thirds
• Improved disaster recovery and business continuity

At the end of the day, Poureetezadi says the value that MCC gained was enormously impressive. “Nimble is now one of our most trusted partners.”

Taking Storage to the Cloud

Similar to MCC, Kimball Electronics had a complex, diverse storage infrastructure. With nine locations in Asia, Europe, and North America, the global manufacturer was struggling to manage storage across its multiple sites, and quickly reaching capacity. Kimball — which develops infotainment systems, MRI technology, surveillance equipment, and more — needed scalability and reduced complexity.

“After using older storage technology for many years, we wanted to upgrade to a solution that was physically smaller, easier to manage, and could scale as our needs changed,” said Joey Clark, director of computing infrastructure at Kimball.

The company has deployed eight Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash arrays, leveraging HPE InfoSight for predictive analytics to prevent infrastructure problems. Quite fortuitously, soon after deployment, InfoSight identified and repaired a failed drive.

“Since upgrading to the Nimble Storage All Flash Cloud platform, application performance is vastly improved, and the IT team always knows exactly what’s happening across the environment,” Clark said. “Our infrastructure runs better today that when it was housed 20 feet away from our technicians.”

Performance + Scale

By adopting HPE Nimble Storage, Mesa Community College and Kimball Electronics are better managing their storage now and for the future, while also achieving improved infrastructure performance.

Find out more: Discover how to modernize storage infrastructure with HPE Nimble Storage.