Case Study: Oil & Gas Company
Large Oil and Gas Producer Switches to Nimble Storage for 3,000-Seat VDI Deployment
Supporting a Large, Remote Workforce
A multi-billion dollar oil and gas production company was struggling to support and communicate with its nearly four thousand remote users at several hundred field locations. The company’s IT team wanted to improve the efficiency of field operations and make the environment much easier to support. They also wanted to make more efficient use of bandwidth to improve application performance for the company’s corporate applications.
The oil and gas company made the decision to consolidate all field compute needs back into the company datacenter by deploying virtual desktops earlier this year. They deployed XenDesktop and XenServer hypervisor on the company’s existing Dell servers and incumbent storage arrays, but immediately started experiencing serious issues with the storage. “The incumbents storage simply wasn’t performing as well as we expected it to for VDI. Simply adding more shelves and larger controllers made the business case cost prohibitive,” noted the IT Manager.
The oil and gas company decided to run a POC to compare two different controllers from the incumbent with the Nimble CS460 arrays. In both cases, Nimble easily outperformed the competition. “We quickly realized that the total cost of ownership per IOP was significantly lower with the Nimble arrays than our previous storage platform.”
The oil and gas company quickly made the decision to replace its incumbent storage with two Nimble CS460s for desktop virtualization—one for each of the company’s two active datacenters. After seeing how well the Nimble arrays performed for the new VDI deployment, the oil and gas company deployed two additional CS460s for its MS Exchange 2010 environment, again placing one array in each datacenter in support of its’ high availability architecture.
“For us, latency was a key issue,” explained the IT Manager. “End users definitely notice a difference in latency when using their key applications. We wanted better application performance than they had with their local desktops; therefore we needed to guarantee a maximum of 2-4 ms of latency 95 percent of the time for each of our CS460s. We also wanted each CS460 to have enough capacity to run 1,000 virtual PCs. For disaster recovery, we could then double the load on the remaining Nimble CS460 and run 2,000 PCs with 5-8ms latency in event of a failure.”
Achieving Success with the Nimble Arrays
By deploying VDI on the Nimble arrays, the oil and gas company has significantly improved operational efficiency. “The Nimble arrays are very easy to manage and deploy,” according to the IT Manager. “In addition, the cost/performance ratio for Nimble storage is significantly better than our previous Incumbent solution. Our four-year cost per IOPS dropped by 72 percent. We have also been able to achieve 37 percent-plus compression on the Nimble arrays. We are able to get the same amount of performance using significantly less power and space in our datacenters.”
And finally, the Nimble solution has improved recovery time for the virtual desktops. “With Nimble storage, it took only half as much time to recover after an outage—to spin up all of our virtual PCs—than with our previous storage platform,” noted the IT Manager. The Nimble arrays and XenDesktop solution also helped the oil and gas company achieve itsbandwidth efficiency goals. By deploying virtual desktops, they no longer need massive amounts of bandwidth to serve the company’s remote locations.
“Easier management and better TCO are always great, but the most important benefit is that we are able to give users better application and VDI performance with the Nimble arrays—not only for our office productivity applications, but for our core field data capture systems as well,” the IT Manager concluded. “We had been receiving a lot of complaints about system performance on the older storage platform, but we haven’t received a single call to our help desk since deploying Nimble. Our IT department is happy, our end users are productive, and our management is thrilled with the cost savings. What more could any IT Manager ask for?”
