HPE Alletra dHCI Reviews

It's really about simplifying my infrastructure and getting myself to be cloud-enabled in a hybrid infrastructure so that I can move in and out of the cloud. That way, I can have a very easy-to-manage, intelligent infrastructure so I no longer have to worry about level one and level two calls. The storage is intelligent, it's taken care of itself. For example, if I want full-stack management, or I want to know if my virtual machines are being bad actors or noisy neighbors, or the firmware on my servers or hosts, or my hardware is all in good shape or if it has a predictive failure — I want to know about it and I want it to open up a ticket for me so that the part can be delivered to me and I don't have to open up a ticket. 

Here's a good scenario: Years ago I used to manage large data centers. I started out with 800 servers, I had 16 people. When I left there, I had 2,900 servers and eight people. That is the reality of IT staff. They're constantly being compressed and asked to do more with less. In order to do that you have to have an intelligent infrastructure. You have to have a methodology that allows you to be able to supply your user community with the services that they need consistently with a smaller staff. That is what really drives DACI and HCI.

Our clients come in all sizes, from small, medium, and large-sized businesses.

Nimble gives time back to our clients. They know it's secure. They know that it's self intelligence software. They know that it's going to report to them and let them know if there's an issue — it's going to give them predictive data. It's going to give them a full stack of data. What a lot of them couldn't see before was what's going on with the virtual environment. Now they can see that because it tells them. So not only is it storage, it's telling them, "Hey, here's how your virtual machines are acting, and oh, by the way, you need some more memory on this server." You don't expect that from any other storage. I've only seen it with Nimble. It gets them out of that firefighting mode. Now they can actually go do the things that their customers are asking them to do. That's how it changed their life from day to day for the business.

What's really intriguing about it is they truly took everything that was required to run on the host, typically in an HCI solution, and ran it out of the storage. 

You don't have to have any virtual controllers or any of that management that takes away from the process or a memory that you would use for your virtualization. You don't have to take any of your resources away — it's brilliant.

The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud. It has intelligent replication to the point where I can replicate to two different sites and to the cloud. 

There's a three, two, one, zero rule. That means I need three copies of my data on two different types of media and I need one of them to be protected from ransomware. I need it to be immutable. The zero stands for zero errors; I need to know that my backup was successful and I've actually tested it and can say that I can restore from it. A lot of people miss that point. 

The intelligence of the solution, in general, is great. There are other great features like Triple+ parity RAID. They are on par, or better than any of the other storage vendors out there for a much more reasonable price, but what really puts them over the top for customers is the intelligence.

Every time a vendor buys someone else, and HP is no different than anyone else, they usually mark it up. When they bought Nimble, I said, "Oh man, that's it. Nimble's done. They're going to screw it up." And they didn't. They actually invested a lot of time and a lot of resources to make it better and to take what was good inside of Nimble, including the InfoSite intelligence, and applied it to other products in their portfolio to make the whole stack intelligent. They really did what they set out to do, which blows me away because typically they fall down on their face.

Nimble It's only available using iSCSI — Nimble can run iSCSI or Fiber Channel. Although iSCSI is cheaper, from a performance perspective, if you've got a really high-performance need, then you need Fiber Channel. 

Not to get too technical, but people tend to think that adding more ports gives you that much more bandwidth — that's not true. Every stream must be dedicated to a port. You could actually do port saturation and not use some of your ports that you just dedicated to your storage.

It's not as mature as Fiber Channel — no one is. Fiber Channel is more expensive, but if high-performance is what you seek, then you need Fiber Channel. I hope that they bring that forward. They're doing all kinds of leaps and bounds with the new Nimble. I really love where they're going, but I think Fiber Channel should be on the docket for dHCI. 

It would be nice if they just provided a simple, easy to read matrix (white paper) on the different models. Today, it's a little convoluted. It's a little hard to read. You have to actually show it to a customer and explain it to them. I shouldn't have to explain it to them. It should be very simple: here are your options, here's your expansion, here's how much storage you get with that, etc. The information is kind of there, but it's just, it's ugly.

I don't mean to call anyone's baby ugly, but they need to improve that datasheet. That would be my pet peeve with them. Their documentation needs to be simpler to read yet more detailed so it's easy to compare models and easier for clients to pick. They shouldn't have to have us sit down with them and explain to them why. They should be able to look at this and say, "Oh, okay. I understand where I need to be. I don't need a decoder to figure it out." That and the fiber channel are my pet peeves.

The documentation needs to be improved — the quick specs are just horrible.

I think there could be more automation capabilities; however, I think they're moving in this direction. More automation to open and close tickets, to get those service tickets open. They've done a lot in that area and I think that they again should focus on introducing more somewhere down the road. 

I have been using Nimble for roughly four years.

The stability is actually incredible because as they improve the older systems, the new operating system and new firmware deployed on it. It's now at six nines. So it's actually more reliable than it was when we bought it — it's fantastic.

I've never had an issue with Nimble Storage. The only problem that I've ever seen wasn't actually to do with the storage, It was an issue with the network. They didn't have their iSCSI set up correctly. It wasn't efficient. They weren't getting the throughput that they wanted. That was a simple change, but it had nothing to do with the storage; however, if you were to sit there and look at it with typical software that comes with VMware, it's going to say there is a storage latency issue. This is because it's looking at the time it takes to travel from the host to the storage and back. What it fails to see is that there are several components along that line. It doesn't mean it's your storage. InfoSite was able to see that, tell us, and show us where the real issue lied. The storage was acting very quickly, but the network was not.

It's very easy to scale. It's very simple to scale. Regarding the dHCI, if you put a new node on the network, it discovers it and says: "You want to add it?" — it's fantastic. I think they've done a real good job.

I didn't use them. I reached out to one of my friends at one of the distributors, because I know she knows the dHCI code — I talked to her about it. We have our own lab and we put one up in our lab and we started playing with it and picking it apart. It was pretty much straightforward, so I didn't have to call on them. For this reason, I can't really evaluate them.

I deployed quite a lot of different hyper-convergent products. 

The reason why I switched really came down to the intelligence, the InfoSite, and the fact that I really liked the idea that I can scale my storage independently.

A lot of people bought hyper-converged and then they said, "Oh, I need some storage. So I'll just use the storage on the hyper-converged and present that out to another server." That tends to ruin HCI. It will ruin your HCI, your ratios by doing that. You'll outgrow the box. You'll be all frustrated. And they were.

With Nimble dHCI, once I deploy it and set it up for dHCI, I can then take a portion of that storage and say, "Hey, you know what? I want to attach a sequel server to this." Then I am ready to start using this additional storage. I can sweat out my other assets.

Everyone always thinks greenfield is the way to go. Sure, of course it is. But nobody can afford a greenfield data center. That's just crazy talk. When I ran data centers for years, we would budget-cycle the data center. We'd say, "Okay, I'm going to compute on year one; on year two, I am going to do networking; and on year three, I'm going to do storage." They never are aligned with each other — the age of the equipment is never aligned. 

The refresh dates are never aligned. That makes it very difficult for those HCI stories. It's got to be the perfect storm. It really comes down to the fact that I need a better way to manage the infrastructure. That's when it becomes a more viable story. People say to me, "Well, I can buy servers cheaper here than I can in Microsoft Azure." Of course you can, but here, you're comparing a banana to an orange — they're not the same. The orange is obviously more tasteful.

I don't like bananas but If that's your thought process, that: "Hey, I want to refresh servers and that's all I want to do." Well, okay. Go ahead. Go ahead and do that. But you're constantly in that cycle. Why do you spend so many cycles refreshing? Why do you spend so many cycles maintaining infrastructure? Why is it that you have so many different tools to manage your infrastructure? The answer is because you won't get out of that mindset.

You have to step back from that mindset and say, "Imagine If I didn't have a data center. How would I do it today if I had a greenfield?" It doesn't mean you have to go out and start a greenfield — you start a little section that's green, move through your data center as you cycle, repurpose your budget to build the new infrastructure in a new way that's easier for you to manage and to procure.

A customer could set this. A customer with zero experience could set this up. Just pick up the manual and go set it up. I happen to charge for that, so don't tell them I said that.

I think the price is good. 

I hate talking about products. I think we should sit down and talk about what you are trying to do? What are your business goals? Because your business dictates to you what projects are important to them. What are they trying to accomplish? How do I help you accomplish those goals?

A lot of times, what it comes down to is they don't have the time to do the infrastructure the way we used to do infrastructure. That's no longer acceptable by the business because it's not important to the business. Think about how you can be a good business partner and provide them with the applications and the data they need access to from anywhere in the world. Look at us now. We're all home. I'm in my basement. Everyone feels bad for me. My basement is a fully furnished basement with a pool table, a beer fridge, a 60-inch flat-screen TV. There's even a music section over here with a full drum kit and guitars. So don't feel bad for me.

At the end of the day, you're not in the IT business. You're in the business of making some products, whether it's t-shirts, shoes, chairs — I don't care what it is. Whatever your products are, that's your business. Your business is not IT. But IT is the tool that helps you sell.

What the business wants to know is, "Hey, I'm giving you a lot of money for IT? How did you help me sell that chair? I need to sell more of those chairs in order to pay for that IT equipment." How do you help them do that? One of the ways is to reduce the work that you have to put in. You can focus on the applications and the innovation that helps them sell that chair. We should be talking about how do we help the business become more agile. You should be focused on, "Hey, they're working from home, how can I get them better access?" Maybe you shouldn't be doing anything in the data center. Maybe you should be moving to that hybrid infrastructure.

dHCI with Nimble Will give you the ability to start growing your data into the cloud in a bi-directional way. Now you can start talking about technology once you understand what their problems are; however, you can't just go in and talk about technology. You have to talk about what the problems are. How are you going to sell? If their problem is they're trying to put a screw in the wall and you hand them a hammer, you're not really helping them out — you'll get the job done, but it's going to be ugly. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

There's always room for improvement. I think that more automation is needed. Certainly, they're getting there. I think that the reason why I am giving them a nine is that it's probably the best dHCI solution out there. From a storage perspective, outside of dHCI, I think it's one of the best storage solutions out there in the market. I think it's priced right and it's extremely intelligent.

My biggest pet peeve is you need to give IT folks time back. The worst thing in the world is when you've got a problem with a system and you call support and you get level one and they go, "Okay, I need you to go in and I need you to dump these reports for me." The brilliant thing with Nimble is you don't have to do that.

They already have the reports because InfoSight provides them with the data all the time. So you don't call level one, you don't call level two, you go directly to level three. To me, that's the way it should be. 

You've got the data. Doesn't your team know how to read it? That to me is the most important feature of Nimble and what puts them on top of my charts. Because it's truly intelligent. Not only that, they're taking advantage of the intelligence of it to actually be proactive for their customers.

We use the tool regularly for strategic purposes.

The solution works well. It is similar to other products.

Companies in small countries face problems with spare parts.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

The tool is scalable enough for all clients. Our clients have several thousand employees.

There are few field support engineers available. We have to wait for spare parts.

Neutral

I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten. The setup takes one day. We need a few days for migration and to get the product running.

The prices are very high. I rate the pricing an eight or nine out of ten.

I worked for an IT integration company. Now, I am a consultant. We work with customers who do not need much scalability. I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We run a private cloud for law firms. We use the solution there. It offers VDI for remote access. 

The product has cut down a lot of service tickets. Earlier, people complained about slowness. 

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is fast and easy to use. My favorite feature is its support. You will get support within one minute.

The product is expensive. 

I have been using the product for seven years. 

The tool's stability is good. 

I rate HPE Nimble Storage dHCI's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The tool's deployment was complex. 

HPE's team helped us with the product's deployment. 

I rate HPE Nimble Storage dHCI a ten out of ten. 

Essentially, we utilize it with a Hyper V backend to store data for several Hyper V servers. We run various services on it, such as SQL services, print services, data storage, ADA services, and all the standard functions.

Simply being able to move objects and the duplication feature have been quite effective. 

They should improve just the support.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage dHCI for the past two years.

It is perfectly stable and I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We have almost 850 users and have plans to increase it in the future.

Regarding support, I feel that once you connect with someone, it's acceptable. However, HPE seems to have made their support services more complex compared to a few years ago. I think it requires improvement.

The deployment takes almost a month.

We explored Dell's server options and various server solutions.

We conducted preliminary research, examining and obtaining demonstrations of the products we were considering. Nimble's solution perfectly met all our requirements.

I would rate it a seven out of ten and advise it to others.

Nimble Storage can be used for any practical application that requires storage.

Nimble Storage is a capable platform with high availability. 

Nimble Storage's integration with the management software could be better. And to my understanding, Nimble Storage is a block storage system. You need to add another server for file services. I think it would be helpful to have other forms of storage included with Nimble Storage.

Nimble Storage has been a part of our main portfolio for the past two years. 

Nimble Storage is highly stable.

HPE technical support is great. 

Setting up Nimble Storage isn't complex. We're in the process of implementing it for one of our
clients, and we're on the BI interface. We haven't implemented the storage yet. We usually deploy with our partner first to test the implementation, get some feedback from our partners, and deploy it later ourselves. It takes two or three systems engineers to deploy.

I rate Nimble Storage nine out of 10. I would recommend Nimble Storage. It's the best solution that HP has right now. We haven't had any problems, so I can't say anything bad about it. Nimble Storage is a rich in-between solution that covers everything from computing to virtualization and storage. My recommendation is to take full advantage of Nimble Storage beyond just a storage solution and incorporate it to get the availability and scalability of the infrastructure.

The solution is easy to use.  

It is easier to manage compared to the other vendors.

The pricing is good.

The stability seems to be reliable. 

The user interface is not as good or easy as the competition, for example, Nutanix. That's what we do find. 

The initial setup is a little bit complicated. 

We'd like to see file sharing capability, for file shares, to be available and much larger.

I've used the solution for 15 years at this point. it's been a while. 

The stability is good. We haven't seen any issues at the moment. It's working well. 

The solution is definitely scalable. If you're looking at SimpliVity, all of them are scalable. It's quite a simple process. You just buy a couple more nodes and then add it to it and it upgrades.

We typically deal with medium companies. That is less than 1000 users. We also do lighter products if a client requires it.

I have some knowledge of Nutanix.

I don't install it as much. I'm not the installer. I'm the seller. I wouldn't know from an installation point of view.

My understanding is it's just a bit complicated to install. The dHCI just takes a bit longer than the other vendors, however, once it's up and running, it's a good product, and gives you some nice features.

We can't complain. The price is good.

I'm a reseller.

We used to work with 700s, we don't sell the 700s anymore. Now, we are doing dHCI.

I would like to let people know that it is as easy as they say it is. It works as they say it does. The only feature I would want to have is it must be Fibre Channel, however, I don't think that's going to happen. Other than that, it's a great little product.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use HPE Nimble Storage dHCI as a storage solution.

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI gives organizations cost savings because it provides high performance compared to the other solutions. It has a good deduplication and compression ratio.

The solution is useful for taking storage snapshots, has high performance, and the CASL architecture is good for optimizing workloads.

The solution could improve by providing better file-level restoration and DVX system options.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage dHCI for approximately six months.

The solution is stable. They meet their 99.999% reliability standard.

The solution can scale but other solutions can do it easier.

I have used Datrium DVX previously.

The installation takes approximately one day. There are other solutions that are easier to install than HPE Nimble Storage dHCI. We have to register the host IPs and gateways but in other solutions, it does it automatically making it less tedious.

If customers were to purchase this solution it would be a good investment because they are always innovating and have good architecture.

The solution has good technology when comparing to the market today. Even though HPE acquired Nimble Storage, they kept on innovating it. 

I rate HPE Nimble Storage dHCI an eight out of ten.

Our client uses this solution for insurance data. They need high-performance capacity for some specific applications. We are premier partners with Nimble and I am a solutions architect. 

The in-line compression is awesome as well as the data loop, because we save somewhere around 80 terabytes capacity, but the actual usage was around 15/20 terabytes. Configurations are simple, even the API configurations. Nimble satisfies my requirements which is great. 

They should include integration to the cloud like S3 bucket or the archiving part. The vehicle would be the backup solution. It would allow us to move some older, rarely used data to cloud. 

I've been using the solution for almost a year. 

Stability is good. We haven't seen any failures in the past year. It does require manual maintenance.

The solution is scalable, we just have to create the enclosures. 

Technical support is good, the moment I logged in and registered it was basically available online and offline, and even the offline process was good. 

I previously used Dell EMC VNX 5700. I think Nimble is better because it's a dHCI, hyper-converged box and Dell is not a hyper-converged box. You have your controls and VA is separate.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy to handle, you don't really need to have rocket science knowledge. Deployment takes about an hour and a half provided all information is in place. I deployed myself and we have operations staff to deal with product maintenance. The Nimble guys or the HPE support team works directly with our operations team. We have about six admins and probably around 100 users. 

This is a good solution. Definitely from a price perspective it's quite expensive, but looking at the performance and the support system that we have with HPE Nimble, it's really good. I would recommend it. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

The deduplication features are quite valuable to us.

I would like to see more compatibility with other vendors. 

I have been working with Nimble DHCI for roughly one year.

It is stable. Our end-users did not experience any issues. 

Nimble DHCI is scalable.

Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond. Usually, they explain that the issues we are experiencing are quite simple to rectify and don't really impact the system. 

We previously used an EMC server for storage, but we found that implementation was easier with Nimble DHCI. 

Nimble is really user friendly and not complex.

Pricing depends. We suggested Nimble to our customer even though we wouldn't be making a profit; however, we proposed to sell NetApp. Nimble charges roughly 25% more interest than NetApp.

We evaluated many products that are equivalent to Nimble, but because we are an evaluated retailer, it really depends on the end-user. When we receive a product, it is only a system, but we can take a look at the actual product, for example: what are the advantages of using Nimble vs. what are the advantages of using NetApp?  

Be sure that your end-users understand and know what they want regarding the ILPS. Sometimes the configuration that they have is not appropriate for their needs and could be more efficient. It all comes down to the needs, their RTS for example. 

As I have no other product to make a real comparison, I would give this solution a rating of nine out of ten. 

We use HPE Nimble Storage dHCI for software, system, and database management purposes.

The product’s performance needs improvement. It could also help with more environment monitoring and AI technologies to improve the performance and thresholds.

It is a stable product.

We have more than 100 HPE Nimble Storage dHCI users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

The technical support services are good. They respond proactively 24/7 and provide online and remote support as well.

The initial setup is straightforward. It takes less than a month to complete the process.

We implement the product with the help of OEM and a local partner.

I recommend HPE Nimble Storage dHCI to others and rate it a seven out of ten.