Case Study: Ask.com achieves higher performance, lower costs, and simplified storage management with HPE Nimble Storage

Nimble Answers Ask.com’s Question: “What’s the Most Cost Effective, Flexible, and Easy-to-Use Storage Platform?"

Ask.com, the IAC‑owned Q&A site with more than 100 million monthly visitors, was running into limits with aging, inflexible storage: escalating support costs, custom hardware constraints, and a critical performance event (13K IOPS on Christmas Eve) that forced failover and lengthy recovery checks. With a small IT team, Ask needed a cost‑effective, easy‑to‑manage platform that could scale without requiring dedicated storage specialists.

Ask.com deployed five Nimble Storage arrays and Nimble InfoSight across three U.S. datacenters. The solution delivered higher performance at lower acquisition and support cost, plug‑and‑play expansion, simple snapshots and replication (enabling fast, no‑downtime migrations), real‑time monitoring and reporting, and greater operational self‑sufficiency for the IT team.

Ask.com

Jack Roehrig

Operations Systems Engineering Director