Why dbg picked Nimble Storage to improve its performance and scalability

dbg now has 50TB of usable space and about 120,000 IOPS thanks to Nimble Storage and Cisco UCS

Software and consultancy provider dbg selected fast-growing storage system vendor Nimble Storage in a bid to improve performance and scalability when dealing with its customers' data sets.

dbg is an independent agency, focused on optimising its clients' data. Its customers are mainly based in the automotive, retail and travel industries.

James Mayl, senior infrastructure team leader at the company, told delegates today at Computing's Data Centre Summit that the firm is "running very big data sets which are multiple terabytes in size, and uploading - depending on the client - between 10GB to 50GB a night into databases".

Mayl explained that the firm needed "real performance and scalability", as when he joined dbg there was one particular hardware supplier across the site, who he did not name, which had storage mixed between DAS siloes, and a low-end iSCSI appliances. The company had some virtualisation from the likes of VMware and Hyper-V, but it had limited ability to increase I/O performance on DAS attached servers, while the VMware platform was running near capacity and the Hyper-V platform was in need of retirement.

"The key problem we had, was that we had a lot of storage but couldn't leverage that storage across platforms without a redesign," Mayl said.

The firm had to start from scratch in a bid to produce a best-of-breed enterprise-class virtualised hosting platform.

"The key thing was it had to be resilient, it had to be supportable from our main office in Bristol, and some of our customers, particularly in the automotive industry, wanted everything [to be aligned with] ISO 27001 2013 ," Mayl explained.

So dbg went through a big proof of concept (POC) process, and looked a number of suppliers and vendors.

"We looked at going through the cloud with either [Microsoft] Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS), and we also looked at colo with a number of sites across the country," said Mayl.

The firm ended up settling with a major colocation (colo) provider in Slough, and then carried on with the POC.

"This is where Nimble were great as they provided us with the hardware we needed to buy, and put pressure on Cisco, who provided us with a UCS server - and also put pressure on the other vendor [who was also considered], as they were unwilling to give us any kit," Mayl said.

"Nimble passed through every test we did with it, managing to completely brick the other vendors' storage compliance; within two days of testing, it ran out of disk space, and even their support guys couldn't bring it back without deleting some of the data that was on it, which caused a lot of concern for our CIO," he added.

Now, dbg has centralised management over the entire UCS and VMware platforms. It has 50TB of usable space and about 120,000 IOPs, which Mayl said was "incredible".

"We can leverage that across the entire platform, which is great for our clients and is a great return on their investment," he said.