Case Study: Atkins Nutritionals

As a global leader in the $2.4 billion weight control nutrition industry, Atkins Nutritionals (“Atkins”) offers a powerful lifetime approach to weight loss and management. The company’s extremely popular Atkins Diet™ focuses on reducing the levels of refined carbohydrates and added sugars, and encourages the consumption of protein, fiber, fruits, vegetables, and good fats. Backed by extensive research, this approach allows the body to burn more fat and work more efficiently while helping individuals feel less hungry, more satisfied, and more energetic.

Time for a Technology Refresh

Although Atkins has more than 100 domestic and international employees, the company operates with a lean IT team. “As a functional IT professional, I am responsible for everything from running the company help desk, to the procurement, ongoing management, and upgrades for all of our software and hardware systems,” explained Dave DeMott, IT manager at Atkins.. “There are only two of us who touch the IT infrastructure including storage on a day-to-day basis.”

Atkins refreshes its IT infrastructure every three to five years. “We started investigating new storage options since our existing equipment was outdated and nearing capacity,” noted DeMott. “We were intrigued by all of the new technologies that were coming out— including flash and solid state disk—and started looking for a solution that could provide the power and functionality we needed keep pace with our company’s fast growth rate.”

Although the primary reason for looking for a new storage platform was to replace aging equipment, DeMott mentioned several significant pain points with the older storage solution. “We were experiencing some significant lag in our virtual environment. It was taking a very long time to bring virtual machines up, and the performance of our mission-critical MS SQL Server environment was starting to degrade.”

Virtualizing the Environment

Atkins started its virtualization journey in 2008, right before moving the company’s headquarters from New York City to Denver, Colorado. “We had three racks of servers in our datacenter. We decided to virtualize our environment with VMware so we could cut
that footprint down as much as possible before the move. We were able to successfully virtualize 70 percent of our environment, paring down from three racks to two.”

Atkins is now starting the second wave of its virtualization initiative. The company recently made the decision to move all of the datacenter operations to a nearby SunGard co-location facility. DeMott’s plan is to reach 95 percent virtualization before the upcoming move to the hosted facility.

Why Nimble Storage

“We always evaluate at least three vendors’ solutions when we purchase new infrastructure,” stated DeMott. “Nimble and two other large storage vendors were chosen for the evaluation. One of our main goals was to find a solution that was more tightly integrated with VMware than our existing legacy storage platform.”

Atkins IT team wanted a solution that would enable them to increase storage performance by taking advantage of newer storage technologies, including flash and solid-state drives, and efficiency features for provisioning, cloning, and compression. “These technologies were either not around five years ago or were out of our price range at that time,” noted DeMott.

DeMott was very impressed with the demonstration from Nimble Storage. Atkins received glowing references from several large Nimble Storage customers. But the information that sealed the deal for DeMott was the fact that Nimble Storage is now being resold by many of the world’s most successful hardware resellers. “If companies and resellers that large are betting their businesses on the Nimble platform, we can too,” stated DeMott.

“Nimble has built its storage solution around disruptive flash and SSDs technology; as opposed to other providers that have to figure out how to bolt these solid-state drives onto the same storage environments they have always been offering,” DeMott explained.
“The build-from-scratch approach is much more efficient and effective, enabling Nimble to offer something newer and fresher than all of the legacy vendors that need to protect their existing revenue streams.”

Simplified Management

Another reason DeMott wanted to move away from traditional big players storage platform was the amount of knowledge required to run the company’s older, legacy solution. “I simply don’t have the time to be a dedicated storage administrator for one of the traditional storage environments. I’ve done that in the past. The thought of choosing something that was much more ‘hands-off’— like Nimble—was extremely appealing. It helped me sell the solution to my Director, showing him how much of my time it would free up for more strategic IT projects.”

The Cisco UCS, Nexus, and Nimble Storage Solution

Atkins purchased four Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers with two hex-core processors and 96 GB of RAM per blade. After obtaining the powerful UCS servers and Nexus switches, the next step was to identify an equally powerful storage platform. Nimble Storage was the obvious choice, according to DeMott. “We are using a 10 GbE backbone between the Nimble arrays and UCS blade servers. The Nexus switches provide redundant paths between everything, and they also handle the Gigabit upstream connection to our network. It’s a very elegant solution overall.”

Atkins now has an extremely robust IT environment. “We actually have much more compute and storage capacity than we need right now,” DeMott admitted. “But I have no doubt that we’ll grow into it! With four blades, we have even more room to grow in the chassis. But since we only purchase new infrastructure every three to five years, we wanted to make sure our new IT environment could scale easily with us as we grow—without the upfront cost.”

Running Mission-Critical Workloads

The new Cisco UCS and Nexus complemented by Nimble Storage solution is running the majority of the company’s mission-critical workloads, including virtualized instances of Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange 2010, as well as its file servers, Active Directory, and BlackBerry servers. “We are a very big Microsoft app shop,” noted DeMott. “We like the fact that the Nimble solution is designed from the ground up to work very well with Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange environments. That was a huge selling point for us during the selection process.”

The only applications not on the Cisco UCS, and Nimble platform to-date include the company’s phone system and ERP solution. “Our ERP resides on an IBM AS/400 server running DB2,” explained DeMott. “At some point we may virtualize these environments as well, which is one of the reasons we chose the Cisco and Nimble Storage solution. Nimble provides easy scalability if we do decide to virtualize our ERP and phone systems in the future.”

Improving Performance

The new Nimble Storage environment has been performing even better than promised, admitted DeMott. “We have already noticed a huge difference in application performance. Before implementing the Nimble solution, we thought we had a problem with several of our VMs and SQL Server applications. It was taking far too long to run reports or even log in. We were getting ready to rebuild several of the VMs to try and fix the performance problems. But after moving to the Nimble arrays, everything went so much faster immediately that we were able to eliminate the headache of rebuilding the VMs.”

“Nimble delivers simply brilliant performance. After deploying the Nimble Storage arrays, it was clear that we had bottlenecks in our older storage environment, not on the servers. I could tell when we moved some of the virtual machines over to the Nimble that were already migrated to the new UCS. The performance gains that we have achieved with the new Cisco UCS server hardware and the Nimble arrays have been ridiculously huge.”

Achieving a 3:1 Consolidation Ratio

When Atkins starting virtualizing its IT environment with VMware back in 2008 they were able to reduce the datacenter footprint from three racks to two. Now, with the universal inline compression provided by Nimble Storage arrays, only three quarters of a rack is needed. “We achieved a 3:1 reduction in physical footprint by going with the VMware, Cisco, and Nimble Storage solution,” noted DeMott.

Although Atkins only needs just three quarters of a rack with the highly efficient Nimble storage platform, they are getting additional space at the co-location facility so they will be prepared for future growth. “Nimble is playing a big part in that growth potential. Because of its efficiency and easy scalability, it will allow us to keep pace with our ever-increasing storage requirements,” noted DeMott.

DeMott is now making plans to push the company’s virtualization and consolidation gains even further by using Nimble Storage technology..“We didn’t have a lot of room to grow in our older storage environment. Our two prior SANs combined had approximately 8 TB of capacity, and we were using about 75 percent of that. Today, the usage on my Nimble volumes is only at 1.8 TB! That was a big concern for my directors before we started the move to Nimble. How would we get 8 TB of raw storage to fit on one 2 TB Nimble unit? But I put my trust in what the Nimble team said it would do, and the arrays have delivered spectacularly on that promise. I was actually shocked to find out how much waste there was on the disks with our older storage system.”

Ease of Updating

Another great thing about the Nimble environment is the ease of updating, according to DeMott. “I performed my first update to the Nimble environment this past Sunday, sitting at home on my couch. The updates I’ve done in the past on older SANs were complex and extremely nerve-wracking. I had to make sure everything was disconnected, download the flash files and point to them, then keep my fingers crossed that everything worked as planned. But with Nimble, we can upgrade the software without disruptions to any of our applications! Nimble has simplified storage management and upgrades to the point it is essentially ‘set it up and forget it.’ For a lean IT department like ours without a dedicated storage administrator—that benefit alone is worth its weight in gold.”

Receiving Stellar Support from Nimble

“The support from the Nimble Storage team has been excellent,” DeMott stated. “We love the phone-home capability of our Nimble arrays. As soon as we rebooted the first Nimble during our recent upgrade, I received an automatic e-mail from the Nimble support system asking if this was something we were doing, or did we have a problem? Just a few seconds later, I received a personal e-mail from our Nimble support representative, double checking to make sure we were doing the update I had mentioned to him earlier that week. I really appreciate the proactive support and all of the best practices advice we received from their support team.”

Looking Toward the Future

DeMott has many more plans for the company’s new Nimble Storage environment. “Implementing disaster recovery is something we are considering in the near term,” DeMott shared. “Once we get through virtualizing everything, completing our upgrade to Exchange 2010, and moving to our new co-lo facility, we will be in a position where we can further push all of the great potential of our Nimble, Cisco, and VMware environment.”

Atkins is also planning to implement desktop virtualization in the near future. “We recently bought iPads for our entire sales team, and our executives use Androids. They are great devices, but we want to make better use of them by offering virtualized desktops to our mobile employees. We are deciding between doing virtual desktops as a service with the added costs of hosting, or doing it ourselves and buying licenses from VMware. But between the UCS servers the Nimble Storage we have in place, we already have the ‘umph’ we need to easily deploy virtual desktops.”

Conclusion

“We purchased our previous server and storage solution five years ago when we were quite small,” concluded DeMott “Our main focus back then was just enabling people to do their jobs. But our company has grown to the point that we are looking at managing efficiencies, making our employees’ jobs better. We are now able to improve their productivity because of the UCS and Nimble technology we have in place.

“Our old storage solution was pretty taxed out. I had to push it really hard to get it to perform adequately. Our new Nimble Storage solution does exactly what I was told it would do—I don’t have to push it at all to make it perform. At the end of the day, if you get all that a vendor has promised you, it’s a wonderful thing. I have already gotten that from Nimble, and much more.”