LANDESK Software overhauls legacy storage infrastructure

LANDESK needed to upgrade the performance and capacity of its aging storage infrastructure, the EMC VNX. This upgrade required at least an additional half a rack of EMC VNX to meet capacity requirements, and would result in increased costs for maintenance and support. In its efforts to find an alternative approach, LANDESK adhered to three criteria: ability to non-disruptively scale, achieve all-flash performance without costly expenditures, and the new storage infrastructure had to offer greater longevity than its previous system.

After researching a number of storage systems, LANDESK concluded that the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform, comprised of Nimble’s CASL architecture and InfoSight cloud-based management, was the only platform that met LANDESK’s key purchase criteria. The company made the decision to deploy the Nimble CS300 Fibre Channel arrays. "Frankly, I've never seen any other vendor deliver the kind of performance that Nimble does with the same set of hardware,” explained Jeremy Balter, senior systems administrator of LANDESK. “We are seeing all-flash performance without the corresponding expense. Furthermore, Nimble removes all of the complexity from the configuration process, and our Fibre Channel arrays were fully operational in very little time."

Today, LANDESK is running a broad range of applications and workloads on its Nimble Storage arrays, including SAP databases, Microsoft Exchange and virtual servers. LANDESK was able to replace half a rack of its previous storage system with just 9U of Nimble storage. LANDESK achieved a 1.5X compression rate for its mixed workload environment saving close to 6TB of space. “We wanted to save space, cut costs, and achieve high performance with our new storage solution. With Nimble, we easily checked all of our requirement boxes,” added Balter.

The Nimble Adaptive Flash platform also provides LANDESK the flexibility it needs to seamlessly scale its IT environment. Since upgrades are modular and dynamic LANDESK can scale storage performance and capacity independently and in line with application and user requirements. Unlike its previous system, the Nimble arrays are able to scale without having to rip-and-replace LANDESK’s storage infrastructure, eliminating downtime along with the associated cost, complexity and risk.

“The Nimble approach really stood out from the competition and they’ve provided a platform that confirms they will be a longstanding partner of ours,” Balter continued. “The solution exceeded our expectations with all-flash performance without the corresponding expense. We’re realising additional savings with the datacentre footprint reduction and ability to scale non-disruptively. With our lean IT organisation, it is essential that we simplify our IT infrastructure to maximise efficiency. Nimble Storage has played a major role in making that happen.”