Chassis Providers Flexi-Van Leasing Transforming Infrastructure With Nimble Storage

Flexi-Van Leasing, Inc. has transformed its infrastructure leveraging InfoSight Predictive Analytics, a core component of the Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Platform.

InfoSight is an analytics framework that diagnoses, predicts and prevents problems across the infrastructure stack. Flexi-Van Leasing accepted a 2016 Technology Leadership Award from Ventana Research, Inc. in IT analytics for accomplishments in this area.

The annual awards recognize pioneering IT organizations that embrace technology and apply best practices to drive change and improve the outcomes of business and IT processes.

Based in New Jersey, Flexi-Van Leasing is one of the largest chassis providers in North America with 12 locations and a fleet of more than 130,000 units. Chassis units are leased by trucking companies to transport cargo containers to and from ships and trains as part of the inter-modal transport network. In a deadline-driven environment where any infrastructure downtime could backlog operations and give trucking customers a reason to turn to competitors, Flexi-Van Leasing leveraged the automation and predictive nature of InfoSight to ensure that the company’s infrastructure always runs at performance.

“Six years ago, I joined Flexi-Van Leasing to overhaul its IT program. Today, the company has a infrastructure that supports millions of transactions every day. InfoSight helps us manage our infrastructure more effectively, especially in its trajectory for resource utilization and VM monitoring,” said Jim Mercer, director of IT, Flexi-Van Leasing. “Being recognized by Ventana Research as a technology leader is an honor that wouldn’t be possible without my dedicated team and our close partnership with Nimble Storage.“

InfoSight collects and analyzes hundreds of billions of sensor data points in more than 9,000 customer environments, and then uses predictive analytics to solve IT’s most complex issues – often before the customer even realizes there’s a problem. Through the predictive analytics and machine learning capabilities of InfoSight, Nimble Storage is able to tackle the bottleneck between data and the application – also known as the app-data gap – to ensure customers can operate their businesses at peak speed, without worrying about the burden of downtime.

Benefits Flexi-Van Leasing has achieved using InfoSight include:

• Identification of issues before users are affected: More than 230 Flexi-Van employees depend on applications within the company’s infrastructure to run daily operations for everything from leasing and billing processes to email and phone communications. InfoSight continually monitors infrastructure resources and identifies issues before users are affected so that productivity remains intact.
• Diagnosis of indicators that impact performance: Flexi-Van Leasing’s IT team leverages InfoSight VMVision to identify and diagnose the top 10 ‘resource hogs’ within its infrastructure. This allows them to reconfigure affected VMs to expand capacity and improve performance as needed.
• Historical view and accurate future forecasts: InfoSight provides a deep history of analytics so that Flexi-Van Leasing’s IT understands how platforms have been performing and can use the data to forecast future capacity, performance and bandwidth requirements.
  

“Nimble takes great pride in providing solutions that empower IT leaders to spend more time on strategic priorities,” said Rod Bagg, VP of analytics and customer support, Nimble. “The Ventana Technology Leadership Award given to Flexi-Van Leasing is well deserved. We’re proud of the operational simplicity the company is enjoying as a result of using InfoSight.“