SmartStack Integrated Infrastructure Solutions

SmartStack Integrated Infrastructure
Solutions Bring Speed, Scale, and
Simplicity to Your Data Center
Nimble Storage SmartStack Integrated Infrastructure
The speed of business is accelerating. To maintain a competitive edge, you must
be able to quickly deploy new, revenue-generating and productivity-improving
applications. As enterprise applications proliferate, the long lead times required to
design, procure, test and deploy them can compromise your competitiveness. You
need proven, easy-to-deploy, and scalable IT infrastructure with enterprise-class
performance to fuel your long-term success.
Nimble Storage® SmartStack™, an integrated infrastructure platform built on best-ofbreed technologies from Nimble Storage and Cisco, integrates storage, networking,
and computing and scales seamlessly and independently in line with your changing
business requirements. While other approaches tend to proliferate operational
complexity and inefficiency, increase costs, and hamper IT/business productivity,
SmartStack solutions provide a proven reference architecture to streamline
deployment and time-to-value.
“Nimble’s tight integration with the Cisco
offering was a big selling point for us. We really
did our homework before we decided to switch
platforms. I spoke to analysts at Gartner and
contacted a few of my colleagues at a local
university for a reference. All of them confirmed
that the Nimble SmartStack was an excellent
choice, so we made the decision to purchase
our first Nimble CS460G array.”
Tom Uva, CIO, WYNIT Distribution
Nimble Storage SmartStack
Nimble Storage SmartStack integrated infrastructure solutions bring together Nimble
Storage Adaptive Flash storage arrays, and Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco
UCS®) for computing and networking resources.
With roughly 80 percent* of IT staff time being consumed to manage and maintain
siloed traditional infrastructure, your staff has little time left to focus on strategic
business initiatives. Integrated infrastructure solutions dramatically increase your staff
efficiency and significantly reduce errors resulting from repetitive, manual configuration
tasks. Policy-based automation increases efficiency, frees staff time, and helps ensure
compliance. Cisco UCS Director provides comprehensive infrastructure automation
and orchestration for your Nimble SmartStack solutions (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Nimble Storage SmartStack Integrates
Nimble Storage Arrays with Cisco UCS
Highlights
How Is SmartStack Different?
Speed
Accelerate application deployment and time-to-value with pre-validated integrated
infrastructure solutions
Support line of business IT requirements by optimizing application performance
SmartStack integrated infrastructure
gives you:
Scale
Reduce your data footprint by 30 to 70 percent
Scale in line with capacity and performance requirements
Lower upfront capital expenses (CapEx) by purchasing what you need today and
scaling in line with changing business requirements
Simplify
Reduce complexity with unified integrated infrastructure
Reduce risk with pre-validated solutions
Lower operating expenses (OpEx) with unified management that enables your staff
to focus on strategic initiatives
Best-of-breed components: storage,
network, and compute integrated
to maximize your return on
investment (ROI)
Seamless scaling of storage capacity,
storage performance, and computing
capacity to future-proof your investment
without having to overprovision from
the start
Integrated management and monitoring
to lower costs and help ensure
business resiliency
Speed
Success in today’s hyper-competitive global marketplace requires responsiveness
and agility. This translates to having the ability quickly and efficiently launch new
revenue generating and productivity enhancing applications. You need powerful
high-performance infrastructure to power your applications and maintain your
competitive edge.
“When we moved our SQL, Exchange,
and Citrix environments onto Nimble’s
SmartStack for business critical applications
our users immediately expressed their
amazement with the performance increase.
Speed Application Deployments
Nimble and Cisco provide pre-validated integrated infrastructure solutions with a
broad range of reference architectures designed to support your most critical business
applications and workloads including:
Desktop virtualization
Server virtualization
Enterprise applications
Emerging applications
And that wasn’t the only benefit. Now, with
the Cisco UCS blades and Nimble, we’ve
reduced our data center footprint down to
just two racks of hardware. As a result, we
have reduced our dataccenter co-location
costs by 50 percent.”
Aaron Britt, Director, IS infrastructure,
Rather than taking months to test and deploy a single application and the risk to the
business, integrated infrastructure based on pre-validated reference architectures
empowers your IT staff to quickly and efficiently deploy new applications to give you an
advantage over your competition (Figure 2).
DMB Associates
Figure 2: Reduce Deployment Time with Nimble Storage SmartStack
Project
Completed
Project
Start
Many Months
Typical Time
Required
Architect and Size
Data Center Plan
Procure
Detailed
Design
Deploy
Test
Cut Implementation Time
Reference
Architecture
Data Center Plan
Procure
Deploy
Test
And after deployment, enterprises expect to save
at least 25% of IT staff time on operations and
maintenance, according to IDC.*
Business benefits include:
Faster time-to-value for new application
deployments
Less staff time needed for configuration
Cost savings
Higher-quality, compliant installation
Optimized performance
A completely supported configuration
Optimize Your Applications
The most powerful processors available can’t make your applications perform if
they are starved for data. The combination of the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform
delivering up to 500,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and Cisco UCS with
world-record setting performance across all workloads provides a high-performance
foundation for your applications.
*IDC, Integrated Systems: End-User Survey Report, 2014, doc #251695, September 2014
Scale
With legacy infrastructure, you need a detailed understanding of your resource
requirements to accurately deploy a solution that will meet your needs today and scale
with your business in the future. More often than not, you overprovision your infrastructure
because you don’t have an accurate view into how your workloads will change over time.
This is a costly and inefficient way to purchase infrastructure.
Nimble Storage SmartStack is modular, so you can purchase exactly what you need today
and easily scale your computing resources, storage performance, and storage capacity
independently and non-disruptively as your business needs change. This capability saves
upfront capital expenditures (CapEx) because you don’t have to pay to overprovision your
infrastructure. It also saves OpEx because you don’t have to house, power, cool, and
manage resources that you are not using. In addition, with Nimble Storage SmartStack
and its automatic compression, you can immediately reduce your data footprint by 30 to
70 percent. This reduction in turn reduces your storage system footprint and creates more
space and efficiency in your data center.
“We started gathering information by talking
to several Nimble Storage customers. All
of the reviews were all extremely positive.
Everyone told us the same story — that
Nimble Storage provided the fastest write
speeds, stellar read performance, and the
ability to easily scale out when needed —
all in one device. Plus, Nimble was one of
the few storage platforms we could find that
was compatible with the both the Cisco UCS
and Unified Communications solution.”
Darrell Parker
Director of Information Systems
Simplify
Oaks Christian School
IT organizations are straddled with cost and complexity which stifles innovation and
creates two key challenges:
Costly over-provisioning that worsens as workload demands increase
Increased challenges in establishing and maintaining service level agreements for
business-critical workloads
Reduced Complexity
In the past, you deployed infrastructure in applications tiers and silos to support the
unique characteristics and requirements of business-critical applications. Today,
with Nimble Storage SmartStack, you can support enterprise-wide applications and
workloads within the same integrated infrastructure solution. This effectively eliminates
the complexities of siloed architectures and dramatically reduces both cost and
complexity while optimizing application performance. Nimble Storage SmartStack is
unified, integrated infrastructure that enables you to create pools of resources that can be
deployed on the fly and in alignment with changing application demands, further reducing
cost and complexity and ultimately making your business more responsive and agile.
Reduced Risk with Pre-validated Solutions
Nimble and Cisco have performed extensive testing across a broad range of business
applications and workloads to create reference architectures using industry best practices.
These pre-validated reference architectures provide easy-to-follow blueprints to ensure
the successful deployment in a fraction of the time of legacy siloed architectures. Upon
deployment, you will have a configuration fully optimized for
your workload.
Unified Management
Nimble Storage SmartStack can be managed through a single pane of glass that
provides comprehensive infrastructure orchestration and management: Cisco UCS
Director. Unified management helps lower OpEx by automating routine tasks, effectively
freeing administrators from the constraints of labor-intensive manual configuration
and management. Nimble Storage InfoSight™ storage management, an integral part
of Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform, helps ensure peak health of your Nimble storage
infrastructure by proactively identifying problems, and offering actionable solutions — all
in real time. Nimble InfoSight provides intelligence to help you deploy the right balance
of enterprise storage resources — dynamically and intelligently — to meet the changing
demands of business-critical applications.
“Storage administration is extremely simple
and straightforward with the Nimble arrays.
We just set them up and let them go. It’s very
easy to manage and create LUNs, set up the
snapshots, and do the replication. Upgrades
on the Nimble arrays are also very fast
and easy. It does the failover, updates the
controller, and it’s immediately back online.
The Nimble upgrades are a completely
seamless process — no headaches, no
problems.”
Amado M. Garcia
Senior Systems Administrator
Community Health Plan of Washington
Bring Speed, Scale, and Simplicity to Your Data Center
Nimble Storage SmartStack integrated infrastructure solutions help you quickly and
confidently deploy performance-optimized applications and workloads across server
virtualization, desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI), private cloud, and critical
enterprise workloads including Microsoft applications, Oracle databases, and SAP HANA
implementations. SmartStack solutions leverage the seamless, independent scaling of
both Cisco UCS and Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash storage arrays to create right-sized
deployments without overprovisioning—while also providing a non-disruptive growth path
to help ensure always-on availability of critical workloads. The entire infrastructure can
be managed by Cisco UCS Director, providing unified management, with the SmartStack
workflow automation. The solution saves both CapEx and OpEx, greatly reducing your
total cost of ownership (TCO).
“To support our 18 locations, we looked for a
solution that could deliver the performance,
capacity, and data protection needs of our
virtualized business critical applications
as well as our virtual desktops. Nimble
Storage’s SmartStack for Desktop and Server
Virtualization delivered what we needed in a
single infrastructure stack — with a small
footprint that can be easily scaled as our
needs grow.”
About Nimble Storage
Alexander Gellerman
Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) is redefining the storage market with its Adaptive Flash
platform. Nimble’s flash storage solutions enable the consolidation of all workloads
and eliminate storage silos by providing enterprises with significant improvements in
application performance and storage capacity. At the same time, Nimble delivers superior
data protection, while simplifying business operations and lowering costs. At the core of
the Adaptive Flash platform is the patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL)
architecture and InfoSight, an automated cloud-connected management and support
system that maintains storage system peak health.
Vice President, Systems Infrastructure
Flushing Bank
For More Information
Nimble Storage SmartStack: www.nimblestorage.com/smartstack or
www.cisco.com/go/smartstack
Customer case studies: www.nimblestorage.com/customers/
Cisco UCS: www.cisco.com/go/ucs
Cisco UCS performance: www.cisco.com/go/ucsatwork
211 River Oaks Parkway, San Jose, CA 95134
Phone: 408-432-9600; 877-364-6253
Email: info@nimblestorage.com
www.nimblestorage.com
© 2015 Nimble Storage, Inc. Nimble Storage, the Nimble Storage logo, CASL, InfoSight, SmartStack, and NimbleConnect
are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nimble Storage. All other trade names are the property of their respective
owner. COP-0715