My name is Don Shields, and I am the CIO of Nodaway Valley Bank. Nodaway Valley Bank has been providing financial services in the Northwest Missouri region since 1868. We pride ourselves on personal attention and service.
Prior to Nimble our primary issue was disaster recovery issues. Compounding the D/R issues, lack of storage on the aging EMC array was causing capacity issues due to duplication required by Veeam across our sites. Lack of experience with the EMC management software also limited our options.
We knew we had more servers coming online in 2012 and our EMC array was approaching its end of support, so we began evaluating storage options. We liked the reliability of the EMC array, but wanted to check options and costs of competitors. We evaluated Nimble, Dell, EMC and HP offerings before deciding to give the nod to Nimble.
Our top four reasons for picking Nimble Storage were:
- Easy to learn array management interface
- Bundled package, replication included without complicated licensing schemes
- Price
- Capacity
We purchased two CS-240 to replicate between our primary and backup data centers. The Bank has approximately 200 users with 35 servers virtualized. We replicate 20 servers hourly between the sites, the remaining 15 replicate on a 4 hour basis. We have embraced virtualization fully including Exchange and SQL servers.
Although I don’t have quantitative data to support my position, the enhanced performance, capacity savings, simplified management, and enhanced support we have experienced after deploying Nimble have been unbelievable. We have been able to install and provision storage to our vSphere environment without consultants other than a few calls to Nimble support.
Nimble has been far and away the best vendor I’ve worked ever worked with.
