I am Steve Kurutz, Director of Information Services at McElvain Energy, Inc. I have worked in IT for 13 years in capacities that include basic user support, systems and network engineering, general consulting, network security, document management, and general IT management.
McElvain Energy, Inc., is a Denver-based oil and gas exploration and production company active in the San Juan Basin, the Permian Basin, the Denver Basin, the Central Kansas Uplift, and the North Dakota Bakken.
Our prior fibre-channel SAN was not supported by a key software application and was nearing full capacity. In addition, it was excessively complicated to manage and did not offer flexibility to adapt to changing business needs, resulting in wasted capacity and administration time.
After determining our basic needs, we summarily reviewed the market and chose three contenders based upon their representation of different approaches to the storage question. Dell Equalogic represented a simple, proven IP-based platform, Hitachi represented an established, high-performance, scalable IP-or-fibre player, and Nimble took the position of an up-and-coming, revolutionary approach to storage.
We chose Nimble because:
- Nimble’s technology, culture, reputation, and market position were in line with our expectations
- The simplicity and flexibility of the product met or exceeded those of its competitors
- Nimble offered, and has delivered, no-apologies performance, head and shoulders above not only our prior SAN but also all competitors.
Our Nimble CS220 supports a two-host Vsphere 5 cluster, three virtual machines within the cluster (using direct IP connections to the CS220), a hardware Microsoft Exchange 2007 server, and a hardware Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 server. Approximately 90 user accounts are active on the system.
In addition, simpler and more flexible management of the array, coupled with its Vsphere integration, has decreased the amount of effort that is necessary to deploy, upgrade, and extend virtual machines to meet business needs.
We are continually impressed by our CS220 array and have benefitted from its simplicity, flexibility, and performance. In addition, Nimble’s support and engineering staff have responded promptly and effectively to our questions and requests.
