We performed a comparison between HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"The latency is good."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"I have found the convergence rate and deduplication the most valuable features."
"The scalability is straightforward."
"Definitely ease-of-use. I've experienced many different arrays out there and Nimble is definitely there."
"Our upgrades are seamless. Whether we're adding storage, or upgrading the software, we don't take an outage for those upgrades."
"This solution has given us reliability that is evident by the fact that it has been running for five years with virtually no hiccups."
"InfoSight has allowed us to centralize our management, understanding how it correlates to the array. It has identified a network issue in the network configuration of ESXi hosts. It enables us to get servers back up faster by 25 percent."
"VMware integration, why is pretty self-explanatory."
"We use InfoSight predictive analytics. It helps us from a performance perspective by identifying potential bottlenecks."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup."
"I like NetApp AFF's deduplication."
"We are a large-scale company, and our growth has been pretty significant over the last five or six years. We like the scale, and the way NetApp grows, so that's why we use it. It's mostly for block storage."
"Data efficiency is the most valuable feature because of the dedupe and compression."
"I think it is a very stable product."
"Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed."
"ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"The software layer has to improve."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"Nimble Storage could increase its flexibility by adding more protocol options. Nimble mainly uses fibre channel protocols, whereas many other storage arrays support fibre channel, iCSI, and NFS protocols."
"The solution could reduce its price."
"The most difficult part about Nimble was the fact that it didn't have a standard length."
"Its pricing could be better. It's expensive."
"There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time."
"HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high, making it one of its downsides."
"I want it to be an active-active array. Nimble would be great as an active-active array because then everything checks out. It would give a feeling of comfort."
"Nimble requires its DNS to work in order to interface with VMware vCenter is a little thorn in my eye, but I am being nitpicky here."
"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."
"When you look at the competitors, they have some features available, for example on the deduplication side."
"The ONTAP S3 implementation is not feature-complete as compared to StorageGRID. We had to move our lakeFS instance from ONTAP S3 based on AFF to StorageGRID."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"FC and ATTO bridges are still needed for cross datacenter replication."
"The price of NVMe storage is very expensive."
"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."
HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 119 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews. HPE Nimble Storage is rated 9.0, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage writes "Beneficial management software, straightforward installation, and good support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. See our HPE Nimble Storage vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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