C A S E S T U D Y: N I K O G R O U P
Niko Group “Sees the Light” with Nimble
Adaptive Flash Platform
Belgian Electronics Manufacturer Selects Nimble as a Consolidation
Platform for SAP, Siebel, and Microsoft Applications
Storage Profile: Niko Group
Industry: Electrical Manufacturing
Location: Sint-Niklaas, Belgium
The Niko Group
Niko Group manufactures
electrical switches and
sockets for the residential
market. The company was
founded in 1919 in the town
of Sint-Niklaas, Belgium.
Niko Group has expanded
significantly over the years,
and now operates from
several state of the art
manufacturing facilities in Belgium and Denmark, and over a dozen sales offices in
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and Slovakia. “We believe that people
deserve a modern, esthetic electrical installation that gives them comfort, control and
efficiency,” said Jan Van Moere, network and security engineer at the Niko Group. “Our
job in IT is to provide and support the IT systems and applications that enable us to
achieve that goal.”
IT Challenges
The Niko Group virtualised its on-premise data centre several years ago using
VMware vSphere 5.5. “We went from a physical hardware service to a 95% virtualised
environment standardised on the VMware platform,” Van Moere explained. “After we
finished the virtualisation initiative, we started moving more of our workloads into the
cloud, including our R&D environment.”
Niko Group was relying on an aging IBM SAN for its virtualised environment. “Our IBM
systems were almost eight years old and had exceeded the warranty period,” Van
Moere said. “We were also starting to experience a lot of major outages on the IBM
systems due to relatively minor technical issues. For example, just replacing one hard
disk in one of the IBM systems would crash the entire environment. Instead of investing
more money on the existing infrastructure, we wanted to look for a newer solution that
could provide higher performance and more stability than our aging IBM systems.”
Van Moere was also unhappy with the level of support his company was receiving from
the existing vendor. “When we asked for support from IBM, they told us the problem
was our responsibility since we put a new drive into the system ourselves. They told
us that we needed to use IBM engineers for everything if we wanted their support
organisation to be responsible for our systems. The situation was starting to cause
serious disruptions to our business, so we made the decision to leave IBM and look for
a better technology partner.”
Searching for a New Solution
Niko Group started looking for a new storage solution in 2013, according to Van Moere.
After evaluating several options, Van Moere narrowed the list down to HP, NetApp,
and Nimble Storage arrays. “I looked at the HP and NetApp systems, but I felt that
Nimble had a more modern approach to storage,” Van Moere said. “Our IBM systems
were quickly reaching end of support so we needed to make a fast decision. None of
IT Challenges
IBM storage systems were reaching
end of support
Existing storage arrays did not
provide high performance
Lacked visibility into system metrics
Not happy with the level of support
received from existing vendor
Solution
Nimble Storage CS500 Fibre channelattached arrays
VMware vSphere 5.5
Business Benefits
Obtained comprehensive visibility
into all system metrics
Achieved 40% faster performance
for backup jobs
Received excellent, proactive support
from Nimble team
“Nimble is delivering a very mature
product which even surpasses its
marketing hype. It just does its
job without a lot of fuss, and we
don’t have to spend all of our time
managing our storage environment
anymore.”
Jan Van Moere
Network and Security Engineer
Niko Group
the other storage vendors were able to provide the technical
performance and management simplicity that comes with the
Nimble platform, so we made the decision to try out the
Nimble arrays.”
Running the POC
“We ran a proof of concept on the Nimble systems because
we wanted to make sure the promises the marketing people
were making were really true,” Van Moere admitted. “The
Nimble approach looked so simple that it was simply hard to
believe all of the performance and manageability statistics at
the beginning. Configuring our Nimble Storage Fibre channelattached array was very simple. It actually took longer to mount
the array in our data centre rack than to configure the system.
Within minutes, we were ready to start migrating over our
production SAP, Siebel, and Microsoft Exchange systems.”
Niko Group’s IT team were able to migrate all of the company’s
production systems over to the Nimble Storage array in just one
day. “We have never performed such a simple integration,” Van
Moere said. “We started at 10 o’clock, and by 3 o’clock in the
afternoon we were already running our production systems on
Nimble. With other vendors, it would always take at least one
week before we could even start to migrate our data to the new
systems. And to our surprise, the Nimble array worked even
better than the marketing people told us it would.”
Easier Management and Better Visibility
“We really love Nimble’s cloud interface,” Van Moere said.
“InfoSight provides easy access to all of the long-term trending
and performance indicators we need. It gives us the level of
visibility we were looking for but didn’t have with IBM systems.
Our team can easily dig into detailed information, even on a
per-VM system. We can even see the performance of one
VMware server running on the platform. The real time graphs
with Nimble enable us to make intelligent choices.”
Non-Disruptive Upgrades
Simple Configuration
“Nimble is all about simplicity,” Van Moere said. “If you need a
volume that’s 2TB, you can just click on a button and it takes
three seconds. You start the server, and that’s it. You don’t have
to figure out how to configure RAID levels and all of the other
fine-tuning you have to do with other storage systems, you
just create the volume and it’s ready to go. I’m not interested
in figuring out which RAID group is providing the highest
performance. Nimble does all of that in the background for us.”
Better Performance
“It was hard to tell how many IOPS we were getting on the old
systems, but we did see a huge reduction in backup times when
we migrated to Nimble. Full backups of our SQL environment are
40% faster on Nimble, compared to the IBM systems. Veeam
backups with Nimble infrastructure of SAP went from almost 3h
to 2h,” said Van Moere.
“With Nimble, you don’t need all of those spindles, it has a
great technical algorithm that does all of the magic on its own.
It’s the first time we have been able to experience such a
nice product that stands on its own. It’s not like other storage
platforms, where you have to build the solution with blocks to
reach the same functionality, the same support, and the same
manageability. With Nimble, everything is already integrated into
one great product.”
Great Support
Van Moere was also impressed with Nimble Support. “When
Nimble detects an issue, they call us by phone and ask what
is going on,” he reported. “We were implementing a few new
network switches a few weekends ago, and one of the new
switches was flowing too much heated air in front of the Nimble.
So Nimble Support called and asked if there was something
wrong, since they could see that our data centre temperature
had increased by 5 degrees. Nimble Support was even faster
than the temperature sensor in our data centre!”
The Nimble platform also enables the Niko Group to perform
non-disruptive upgrades. “We can now perform upgrades when
we need to, even during production hours,” Van Moere said.
“We don’t need to schedule any downtime, it all works without
interrupting our business, which of course is the most important
thing we have to take care of.”
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Phone: +32 7848 0287
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www.nimblestorage.com
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