No enterprise tech conference is complete without customer success stories to back up the pitch, and Nimble Storage’s recently concluded launch event for its newest CS700 family of hybrid arrays was no exception. As part of SiliconANGLE’s exclusive coverage of the conference, Milliman technology architecte Ryan Miller was invited to theCUBE to share how the vendor’s solutions have helped his team eliminate storage bottlenecks increase throughput for their increasingly demanding workloads.

Founded in 1947,  Milliman is one of the largest independent financial risk advisory firms in the world with some 2,000 employees and more than $40 billion of assets under management. The Seattle-based company offers both consultancy services and software products, with the latter hosted internally on behalf of clients by Miller’s unit. The group is responsible for everything that entails, from deploying and managing the underlying infrastructure to delivering the capabilities required to support applications running on top.

Prior to adopting Nimble storage, Milliman utilized a traditional ETL (extract, transform, and load) tool to move information from its relational databases to the central reporting environment where it’s processed and delivered to end-users. The setup worked, but only barely,  struggling to adequately meet the specific performance of the company’s different workloads. That caused bottlenecks that impeded operations further down the data management lifecycle.

An opportunity for change presented itself after Milliman decided to modernize its data warehousing environment. “But we didn’t know exactly what we needed performance-wise, and we had a lot of capacity needs, and the traditional method of how we deployed storage would have been very cumbersome, expensive and just not very efficient,” Miller reflects. So the company began scouring the marketplace for a modern solution that could provide a more suitable alternative and eventually settled on Nimble’s.

By mixing flash and disk, the vendor’s platform provides the best of both worlds, according to Miller, balancing the raw performance of solid-state memory with the cost-efficiency of mechanical storage. He says that this combination has enabled Milliman to eliminate a lot of the redundancy in its environment, especially on the networking side, freeing up resources that historically went to keeping the lights for driving business value.

“All of that allowed for the storage platform to no longer be the bottleneck, so that then allowed us to refocus our efforts to optimize the process and the software that we had,” Miller explains. Much of the credit for that goes to the the InfoSight management software that ships with Nimble’s arrays, which is designed to provide a single pane of glass for the entire storage landscape. Plus, the platform includes value-added features like snapshotting and support for in-place upgrades that Miller notes have greatly simplified administration at Milliman.

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