College of Idaho Using Nimble Storage SmartStack Solution for Virtualized Environment

Nimble Storage officially announced its SmartStack converged infrastructure solutions this week and The College of Idaho is making good use of the virtualized storage environment. The college has deployed the SmartStack for Business-Critical Applications offering within its virtualized IT environment, enabling the institution to increase application performance as well as improve user experience.

The SmartStack offerings enable organizations to address storage performance issues for both desktop and server virtualization workloads within a single converged infrastructure stack. This frees users from having to maintain and manage separate infrastructure while letting them cost-effectively handle performance demands.

Nimble is working with Avnet Technology Solutions, which will provide pre-integration services for the SmartStack offerings to speed time to deployment. Nimble also announced a partnership with Australian MSP Applaud in which the company is a VAR for Nimble and part of the company’s growing partner network.

"Our decision to look for a new storage vendor was triggered by the need for increased performance, which after selecting Nimble Storage, has done a complete 180-degree turnaround,” said Alan Price, systems administrator at The College of Idaho. “Nimble Storage's CASL architecture increases our overall efficiency, by offering us high-speed performance that meets our capacity demands.”

“The performance gains have definitely increased the efficiency of our IT team,” he added. “The fact that we can spin up a virtual machine in less than five minutes, which used to take us over 45 minutes, is amazing. After our upgrade, implementing new business applications no longer requires significant planning, and the latency problems we once experienced have been replaced by immediate accessibility for employees and students alike."

The college’s IT team manages virtualized infrastructure for more than 1,200 students and 300 employees. The institution’s Nimble SmartStack solution consists of a Nimble Storage CS-series array with Cisco UCS blade servers. Immediate improvements for the college include end user email opening instantaneously, and server updates taking place within two hours during the business day, with no impact on performance.