With the development of adaptive flash by Nimble, the options for companies that use their storage solution are dramatically opening up. John Furrier and David Floyer of theCUBE were joined by Ryan Miller, technology architect at Milliman, at the Nimble Adaptive Flash Launch where Floyer and Furrier questioned Miller about how Nimble’s current slate of storage solutions have helped his company.
Miller started out explaining that Nimble allows Milliman the ability to do more with “a little.” With Milliman’s work in developing software for various benefits administrations and 401K plans for a variety of business, financial, government, and other agencies, being able to a consolidate a couple of different aspects within the same infrastructure has helped tremendously, especially when cutting costs.

A flexible flash solution

When asked what made Milliman look at Nimble, Miller responded with, “We didn’t exactly know what we needed performance-wise. We knew there was a lot of capacity needs. The traditional method of how we deploy the arc, the storage was going to be very cumbersome, very expensive, and just not very efficient. We were looking for another opportunity to leverage something more modern, something a little bit more space-conscious and also conscience on the cost of deploying.”

Miller further went on to talk about Milliman’s need for a data warehouse. In this respect, it initially needed to get its data onto another platform to report on it. This, in turn, created a lot of data churn, and further havoc through the bottlenecks created by the massive amount of data. Thankfully, Nimble was able to extend the ceiling, allowing Milliman to be more flexible in its deployment.

Achieving both storage and performance needs

The Nimble flash solution, according to Miller, provided Milliman with a large amount of storage space in addition to the capacity for performance.

“We are able to expand our flash capacity on it and upgrade the CPU capability as well,” he explained. “Those 10-gig interphases — all of that allowed for the storage platform to no longer become or be the bottleneck. That then allowed us to focus on our efforts to optimize the process, the software that we had, and the translations and what not.”

The elimination of bottlenecks has allowed Milliman to focus its efforts on improving its process elsewhere. Best of all, through Nimble’s InfoSight software, Milliman can compare the types of workloads it has and see where it is optimizing its data usage, as well as if data protections are in place. This allows the company to make adjustments as necessary, helping Milliman cut costs and streamline their operations.

See the entire conversation below.