My name is Emily Bernardo, and I am the Computer Operations Manager for the City of Del Mar, CA.
I have worked for the City of Del Mar since 2003. The City of Del Mar is a residential community in San Diego County with a population of approximately 4,500. Del Mar is a Charter City with five City Council members elected at large, and operates under a council-manager form of government.
Prior to implementing the Nimble SAN, the City’s data was housed on a variety of physical servers as local storage with no snapshot or management features. The main fileserver and SQL Database server were quickly running out of storage space. The only option for data recovery was to restore from tape.
In 2011, the City undertook a Datacenter Virtualization/Storage Consolidation project through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) Program, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) of 2009. The goal of the project was to reduce energy used in the datacenter through server virtualization and storage consolidation. The City issued a Request for Proposals for the purchase of a SAN and integration of the SAN into its Citrix XenServer environment. The City required a solution was easy to install and manage, did not require additional software or add-ins to perform backups, offered superior performance, and would provide enough capacity for both data and snapshots.
The City selected the Nimble CS210 because of the unique and innovative storage architecture that offered the best value and long term performance. Specifically, compression technology, fault tolerant hardware, and built-in disaster recovery features offered the City the best solution to protect its information assets. In addition, the pro-active support and easy installation and administration were attractive for a small I.T department.
The city of Del Mar purchased a single CS210 and integrated with three XenServer 6.0 hosts. The majority of Del Mar’s physical servers and some VMware ESX 3.0 VMs including Exchange 2007, SQL 2005/2008, Sharepoint 2007, XenAPP 5.0, were migrated moved to XenServer/Nimble environment. The Nimble installation was performed by a local engineer and was painless, lasting just a few hours including implementation and training for IT Staff. Our IT Staff was able to quickly learn how to create volumes and attach to Xen VMs, create protection policies, and fully administer the device to complete the server virtualization and data migration process.
Business benefits include reduction of physical hardware in data center through storage consolidation which has reduced power and cooling requirements; enhanced support by having the remote heartbeat function – support has been aware of issues before IT on a couple of occasions. Management is greatly simplified – less hardware to manage and online software updates means we don’t have to schedule firmware updates after hours.
The experience with Nimble is one of the best relationships that I’ve ever had with a product and vendor overall. The local engineer stops by to check on us and makes a personal phone call to check on open support cases. The product is rock solid and support is extremely responsive and helpful.
