Case Study: Saunderson House Limited

An Award-Winning Financial Advisory Firm

Saunderson House Limited (SHL) is one of London's leading independent financial advisory firms. In 2012, SHL was named "Best Advisory Firm" at the British Investment Week Fund Manager of the Year Awards, and also ranked in the top four at the Chartered Financial Planners of the Year Awards. SHL's client base and assets under management have both increased dramatically since its inception in 1968, demonstrating the growing demand for the firm's clear and unbiased advice and exceptional personal service.

Operating from Two Secure Datacenters

SHL relies on two datacenters, one at the company headquarters in central London and a second site five miles away at Telehouse—one of the UK's largest datacenter and colocation service providers. "Telehouse is a highly secure datacenter," noted Dave Pritt, IT business services manager for SHL. "We use the Telehouse facility primarily for backup, but it is also an active site as well." Saunderson House purchased two Nimble Storage arrays in May of 2012, dedicated to the firm's VDI environment and associated management servers. All data is now replicated between the two datacenters over a 100 MB fiber connection. Each site has a cluster of VMware hosts with 25 live users. The sites are set up as DR pools and can support up to 100 users.

"We are a company that is based on the timeliness, accuracy, and analysis of our data," Pritt stated. "We use this data to shepherd and grow the financial assets of our clients. As an IT organization, we are charged with protecting that data and turning it into information that can be put to good use for our clients. We take that responsibility seriously and are always on the lookout for ways to optimize our storage environment."

Existing Storage Tools Come up Short

"SHL is a relatively small organization," noted Pritt. "We do not have the dedicated resources specializing in SAN management that larger organizations can afford. Our admins have to cover a much wider breadth of IT, so the time we have to keep an eye on the various elements of our systems is limited. What this means is that we have to adopt a policy of exception monitoring, rather than carrying out detailed checks every day of all our systems performance.

Analyzing storage performance data over time was not possible with the company's previous tools. "We had to spend more than two hours each week manually recording all of our storage information to build up a 'picture' of what was happening. But with other urgent IT priorities, this was one of the jobs that often got dropped."

"Other storage arrays provided lots of raw data, but it was very disjointed," Pritt explained. "We were able to take short-term snapshots of storage performance, but it required a lot of heavy lifting to see longer-term trends. We had to take all of the raw tabular data and manually put it into Excel spreadsheets. When we tried to estimate data growth by looking at capacity usage at each snapshot and then connecting the dots, we could only draw a straight line with an arrow pointing up. That's the best we could get from those tools."

InfoSight to the Rescue

When Pritt and his team learned that Nimble Storage was introducing a new storage monitoring solution earlier this year, they quickly signed up to be one of InfoSight's first customers. "We knew if Nimble's new storage monitoring portal was anywhere as amazing as its arrays, it would be a real winner," stated Pritt. The Nimble Storage InfoSight cloud-based solution leverages data sciences to streamline all activities across the storage lifecycle. InfoSight provides all of the information needed to increase operational efficiency at SHL, freeing the firm's IT staff from mundane day-to-day storage administration and enabling them to focus on higher value tasks. "Since we have a small IT team, tools like InfoSight are very important to us, enabling us to quickly look at the status and history, as well as predict possible problems before they become issues," stated Pritt. "With InfoSight, we were able to eliminate the two hours our administrator spent manually recording information each week!"

InfoSight uses sophisticated algorithms and powerful data analytics that enable trending, predictions, and forecasting for Nimble storage environments. "I have worked in analytics in the past and am acutely aware of how challenging analytics and forecasting can be — but also how beautiful it is when it's done right," related Pritt."InfoSight is an example of analytics done right."

Simplified Management and Easier Access from the Cloud

"Our previous on-premise storage management system was not very sophisticated," Pritt admitted. "The legacy storage vendor didn't update its tools very often. And when they did, we had to download the updates and figure out when we could take our systems off-line to perform the upgrades." In contrast, InfoSight is delivered as a hosted, cloud-based service—there is no software to install or infrastructure to deploy. "Nimble Storage InfoSight is a very good example of when the cloud is the ideal deployment platform," Pritt stated. "Our IT team can easily access InfoSight from any web browser, at any time. Nimble also provides more frequent updates, we don't have to download any software, or waste our on-premise server infrastructure to monitor our Nimble storage arrays." Pritt admitted that he still has some concerns about the security of public clouds. But all of the information InfoSight transfers is just telemetry data—no IP or customer data is ever accessed by InfoSight.

Leveraging DeepData Analytics

Although the storage arrays SHL had used before Nimble Storage did provide a lot of raw data, it was not in a usable format. Nimble Storage InfoSight leverages built-in deep data analytics, gathering over 30 million data points per array, per day. InfoSight then takes this wealth of data, and presents it in a graphical format that is easy to understand and leverage, helping customers obtain deeper insight into their Nimble storage arrays.

"I don't want my storage tool to just dump a lot of disjointed, tabular data on the table and tell me I'm on my own," Pritt replied. "Nimble Storage InfoSight turns all of that raw data into information that I can actually use. I really like the option of looking at trends that are presented visually in charts and graphs, rather than seeing just figures in columns. I can react quickly to those visual cues, and move to prevent a future disaster." SHL's previous tools could not tell Pritt what he needed to do to improve the performance of his storage infrastructure. "InfoSight's deep data analytics show us if we need to increase cache, upgrade the controller, or whether the performance bottleneck could be elsewhere, removing all of the guess work of our previous system. I also use the InfoSight volumes tab to look at granular metrics on compression, snapshots, and read and write performance for a specific volume, to help troubleshoot more localized, critical or specific issues. It is especially useful for finding performance bottlenecks in our VDI infrastructure."

Capacity Trending and Forecasting

The ability to forecast capacity is a very important feature of the InfoSight system, according to Pritt. "InfoSight gives us all of the information we need to predict our future storage requirements, without relying on single snapshot information like before. We used to look at our capacity data just once a month to see which arrays were running out of storage. I can now look at usage trends over time. The capacity trending and forecasting is far more usable with InfoSight than any other tools I have seen. And the powerful data analytics behind the scenes gives me a much more accurate projection of my capacity needs than a 'back of the envelope' calculation. When budget time comes around, InfoSight provides all the information I need to gain approval for future purchases. This capability is well worth its weight in gold as far as I'm concerned."

Receiving Instant Alerts and Daily Summaries

InfoSight can be configured to provide alerts for a wide variety of events, including arrays running out of space, orphaned snapshots, and replication processes have failed. It can also send daily summary e-mails of all alerts. "I make it a habit to click into InfoSight first thing each morning," Pritt related. "Even though I know the system will send me alerts if there any issues—I still like to glance at the dashboards and see that everything is 'green' and not 'red'. InfoSight is my one-minute storage confidence checker!" Pritt also uses the automatic alerts to track snapshot status. "Nimble snapshots are an important part of my data protection strategy. The alerts immediately flag any snapshot problems, so I never have to worry about violating our service level agreements."

Tracking Support Cases from within One Portal

With InfoSight, Pritt now has the ability to open and track support status from within the portal. "Most vendors require the use of a completely separate system/login to track open cases. InfoSight has case management is built in. I can easily keep tabs on recent cases, look up old cases, and even search knowledge briefs for related case information from the same page. Putting all of the information I need into one place is a real time-saver for me."

Solving an Ongoing Performance Problem

InfoSight enabled Pritt to solve a storage problem he had been struggling with for months. "The performance of one of our arrays was not as high as it had been, but our existing tools could not provide any insight into the root cause of the problem. By looking at the InfoSight dashboards, I could instantly see the array was running out of cache. I moved some data off of that array and its performance improved immediately! The problem was so much easier to diagnose with InfoSight than with the rudimentary tools we had with our previous arrays. It was like I was suddenly looking through a microscope at the problem, when before I was trying to see it with my naked eye."

Summary

When asked how InfoSight has performed against his expectations, Pritt replied, "InfoSight enables us to see exactly what is going on in each of our Nimble arrays, to anticipate and monitor problems, and open and track support cases—all from a single dashboard solution. Our powerful Nimble Storage arrays are now coupled with a full-featured and incredibly intelligent monitoring and management solution. That's an unbeatable combination in the storage industry today."