My name is Tony Lux, and I hold one of the coolest titles in IT as Purveyor of Technology at Boulevard Brewing Company. I am a veteran, hands-on IT manager with 19 years of experience deploying new solutions that streamline production, boost the bottom line and create greater operational efficiencies. Under my stewardship, Boulevard has been transformed into a cutting-edge manufacturing facility, producing 180,000 barrels a year.
Boulevard Brewing Company is the Midwest’s largest craft brewer. We are the 10th largest craft brewery and 18th largest brewer in the US. We are available in 29 states and have grown every year since we were founded in 1989.
Before we bought Nimble, we were out of space. We only had 3TB of data, but it was taking 7.85 TB of disk. Because of replication and snapshots, it was wasting a lot of disk space. Once we switched to Nimble, our 3TB of data now only take 2TB and our snapshots are done every hour and only take 50GB of disk.
During our evaluation process, we reviewed our current storage solution, Equallogic. We also looked at EMC and NetApp. We were looking for low cost and high performance – other vendors could provide one, but not both criteria.
Here are the three top reasons we picked Nimble Storage:
- Price
- Performance
- Disk savings with dedupe and compression
We have three ESX hosts in our primary site. We had an EQ PS5000 which had 56 VMs running on the 3 hosts. We have a DR site with 3 more hosts and another EQ PS5000 using SRM. Now we have 2 Nimble CS240s in addition and all primary workload has been moved to the Nimble array.
We bought CS240s because I didn’t want to run out of disk space. We use Panologic zero clients in our manufacturing environment but haven’t deployed any other VDI because of performance and space issues. With Nimble we have the space and performance to move forward with more VDI.
Our experience with Nimble has been great. They have responded quickly. I would love to get the SRA done for SRM but that’s my only complaint.
