HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• Simplified storage administration: Due to this, a dedicated storage administrator is no longer needed. Now, we can easily handle the storage systems ourselves.
• Very efficient adaptive flash technology: Even without having hundreds of rotating disks like we had in our former SAN system or having to buy all-flash storage, we get predictable and low latency numbers for all of our storage systems.
• Simple snapshot management: This assists us to manage our snapshots through volume collections and protection plans, and helps ensure that new volumes get the appropriate replication and snapshot plan applied. The overview of snapshot used storage and ease of use when cloning are remarkable compared to legacy storage products.
• Central monitoring and health check via the Nimble InfoSight: The InfoSight portal provides an overview of all our storage systems and their volumes, snapshots and protection. It collects data and creates both automatically generated tickets for any problems or risk of problems, as well as predictions of storage use based on usage trends.

For the most part, we have not encountered any stability issues. But there was one uptime-related firmware bug, which was possible to work around and fixed in a later release.

So far, we have not encountered any scalability issues.

We rate the support as very knowledgeable in the product platform

We previously used a different product. The switch was made to gain a less-complex design for setup and administration.

The initial setup was very simple and after one day of education, all technical staff were comfortable with the platform.

One benefit with the Nimble Storage platform is that is doesn’t contain any software licenses. All functionality comes built-in to the platform.

We compared both traditional vendors including NetApp and HPE as well as upcomers like Pure Storage, Violin, SolidFire, Microsoft Storage Server and others.

Embrace simplicity. You can dispense with in-house deployed administration tools or tricky CLI GUIs. All you need is just a simple and understandable web interface.

Depending on which product platform you are about to replace, you will either just gain far better and predictable performance or you will embark on a journey where you will have to leave the comfort of having a multi-protocol NAS into NFS and/or SMB file servers using Nimble block storage in the backend.

• Data Protection is superb with downstream DR Nimble arrays.
• Confidence in support and not being afraid to keep up to date.

• Simplicity, ease of upgrade of software (no downtime)
• Performance Integration with Commvault
• InfoSight reporting
• Support – World Class
• The Web GUI interface is easy to use and self-explanatory. From the Web GUI you can register the array plugin to vCenter and from within the VMWare Client and the Web Client you have array integration to allow you to Clone Snapshots and present the clone to the ESXi hosts in a couple of mouse clicks. This feature allows VM power users with the appropriate permissions (set in vCenter) to Clone, Snapshot, Expand, delete and even change the Nimble Protection (Snapshot) schedule without needing array logon credentials or needing to go onto the array Web GUI. Commvault recognizes the Nimble arrays through it’s API so we can trigger app consistent snapshots for various products like MS SQL, Oracle, My SQL,Exchange …. The list is expansive. Nimble do provide Exchange and MS SQL out of the box also. There is also a Nimble Connection Manager for VMware (NCM) that automatically set the Path Selection Policy optimized for VMware ESXi/Nimble performance.

• Web GUI should be HTML5.
• Use smaller form factor disk to provide more spindles. Streaming Backup I/O overnight would dent performance if we were a 24*7 business. Most of our workload is 07:30 -18:30.

No.

No, but the SSD cache could do with increasing on some of our system. That’s a financial (Bean Counter) decision.

The best support ever. They will even assist if the problem lies with Hyper-V, VMware and networking. This is why I don’t think you can go wrong with Nimble!

• NetApp, EMC, Dell EqualLogic.
• NetApp relies on lots of disk and was a nightmare to keep up to date. Updating was a major project when it happened.
• NetApp? To complicated and the extras like snap manager for Exchange very expensive. The others? Not much experience of EMC or EqualLogic.

Really simple.Nimble asks you various questions about IP addresses and then you get a pre-installation checklist. If you didn’t have a clue they’d guide you on the phone initially and then do a WebEx session to get you there. Simple.

Competitive. No licensing. Since everything is included.

Tintri

They have All Flash arrays if people are concerned about Hybrid performance.

The support is the major factor in choosing Nimble and the performance has been great in all our Mix Load environments.

• Hybird configuration
• SSD Cache

These features keep the cost per IO and Gig low while giving very good performance. We have multiple database servers on the SAN that require low latency for optimal performance. This configuration allows us to run the database without over allocating memory to them.

Eliminated all IO bottlenecks, reduced from 6 SANs to 1.

Admin interface can be slow.

Two years.

No problems.

No issues scaling.

Support is great, they understand that they can’t live in a bubble. They understand virtualization and other applications.

Yes, Dell EqualLogic. Cost per IO and Gig. Stability.

Very straightforward, up in running and in testing first day.

It is straightforward, no hidden costs.

Yes, Dell, EMC, Hitachi, NetApp, Pure Storage.

If you test it yourself, it is clear how it just beats every other product hands down.

Ease of use with the hardware and software GUI. Easy firmware upgrades. The performance for the price is extremely valuable.

The hardware is simplistic. The physical wiring of the controllers, upgrading controllers, and adding expansion shelves or cache. The software GUI lays everything out nice and clean. You are able to intuitively find what you need to accomplish in few clicks. The reporting is excellent. The firmware upgrades are easy. Just click and sit back and relax. They are non-invasive and take minimal time. The performance is on par with some of the other solutions that cost much more.

We are heavily reliant on SQL databases. Because of the performance out of the array, we are not storage bottlenecked. The price makes the value extremely appealing.

I used to have some gripes with how the GUI worked such as folder organization but the developers listened and released that in a new firmware version. I do want close to real time performance metrics in InfoSight.

Over 2 years.

The product has been extremely stable for us.

We have scaled up and out at our primary datacenter with no issues.

One of the best support experiences out there.

Yes and because of the performance and abilities of the array such as encryption without purchasing new hardware.

It was easy.

There are no hidden costs, but go for InfoSight.

I inherited this vendor in my environment but it has proven to be a worthy vendor and no plans to change.

We have two use cases for the solution. One use case is for our daily work. Another use case is our shared platform. We are a service provider and we have our shared platform to sell some power, some compute and storage to our customers.

The improvement of our organization with Nimble Storage really is with the InfoSight cloud. We are much more proactive. We are never surprised by problems, some disks or control breaks or something like that. The whole staff is very proactive, and we have no problems. We have very high availability of the systems, and that's the main improvement; the end-to-end management from the server, hypervisor, all the storage.

The most valuable feature is the management of Nimble Storage, InfoSight. This is like a cloud. That's really a very nice feature. I think that's the only reason to buy Nimble Storage.

The only area of the product that could be improved is if you have to buy additional storage, you have to buy a block. You can't buy two or four hard drives as you can buy for every other system. You have to buy a block of 24 disks, and that's normally very expensive. So if a customer calls and they want to expand the system for a few terabytes, you have to sell them an expensive solution, and it's the same for us. But that's just part of the system. That's part of the architecture.

A feature that would be a nice addition to the next release would be a filer option. A filer option so that you could connect the sim or NFS or chips like NetApp does for NAS functionality.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. We are very happy with the product.

I have been using Nimble solutions for about four years, since it became part of HPE.

The solution is really very, very stable. We have never had any issues.

The solution is scalable in every direction. You can change the controller online, you can add additional drives, you can add additional connectivity; it's really scalable.

For the Nimble part, support is very available because it's InfoSight. You don't need any first and second-level engineers because of this InfoSight part. And if you really have a problem, but we never have, then you will be able to contact the third level or the engineering. That's really a big improvement, this cloud solution.

We were still using 3PAR storage before we had EVA Storage System. We are a very loyal HPE customer for many, many years, for ourselves and also as a vendor. We have used HPE storage for ourselves for 25 years.

We switched to Nimble Storage because of InfoSight. You can say 3PAR also had InfoSight, but it was not the same quality. It's better right now. And for us, because we have customer systems in our infrastructure, it's very important to have very high availability in our systems. We have to get SLAs, the service-level agreements.

The initial setup was very easy, but we are used to installing storage systems. We have been a storage seller for many years, around 25 years. So it's getting easier and easier.

The deployment takes about one hour. It takes more time to build it in the racks and link the cabling, but the rest is very easy.

I do all the deployment and consultant work myself.

Once you purchase the solution, you don't have to buy a license for Nimble. All of the features are included. You never need to buy a license.

Before choosing Nimble Storage, we also evaluated NetApp and Dell EMC. The biggest difference was the management stuff with InfoSight.

Ninety percent of the Nimble Storage we have sold because of InfoSight. I would advise potential users to check their management ecosystem and not the storage. The differentiator, and for me the most important part, is the management of the system. Because every system is fast and has high availability. That's normal at the moment. 

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that most of the storage problems are not storage-related. Because of the InfoSight cloud, you can see the whole ecosystem end to end. It's not always because a system is slow that's part of the storage; it could also be a server problem, it could also be a network problem, it could be something else. With InfoSight, this end-to-end view, we saw that most of these storage problems were not really storage problems.

The companies that bought this solution from us use it for VMware. They have also used some Oracle in the Red Hat operating system. It's mostly used for the VMware environment. The companies we provide the solution to are generally medium size; one of them is a hospital and the other is an agency that controls the sale of gas. We are partners of HPE Nimble Storage and I'm the technical manager of the company.

A valuable feature for me is the architecture which is pretty good. We have a good throughput and we like that they have a lot of IOPS and low latency is also pretty good. And we also like the verification features because we get some good things with the method Nimble takes to duplicate. If you have a hybrid secondary storage, it allows you to do remote copy, data recovery and business continuity with the solution. And the integration with some other solutions is also good. For now, Nimble has a way of integrating with each solution, it's very good. 

When I'm competing against someone, I would like Nimble to be an active-active controller. As it is now, Nimble is an active-passive controller. If the customer is looking for an active-active controller, then we can't use Nimble and have to go with Primera. Nimble gives us a lot of good things, but without the active-active controller, it's pointless.

We've been using this solution for a year. 

The technical support is pretty good. We do the iteration ourselves, because we have the experience and we provide first-hand support, given the service qualifications that HPE expects from us. Beyond that, Nimble has good support, because it also has Infosight, another value-added solution for Nimble. Infosight has around 10 years of log collection. We provide good first line support to our customers and I think it's important for them to have that.

Nimble competes against IBM Storwize and Dell. The main reason we went with Nimble was that we have over 10 years of experience with Infosight.

We'll use this solution more in the future. With what I see now with the segregated hyper-converged infrastructure, I think that Nimble is going to get a lot more clients because hyper-converged solutions are a closed box and customers want this kind of solution. Customers felt that with the hyper-converged solutions, their hands were tied.

I would recommend this solution. It's been around for over 10 years, working with machine learning in artificial intelligence. It has inline deduplication for all flash storage, and a hybrid version that gives a lot of features. It's an architecture that's based on the controller.

The only drawback of this solution is the active-passive controller, otherwise I rate it very highly.

I rate this solution a nine out of 10.

It's not that expensive and it really brings the latency down; that was the promise from their end and it really did.

Since we are using virtual desktop environments, we had to deal with boot storms and we solved this issue with Nimble.

For me, this product has everything I need in there. What could be improved is performance monitoring, i.e., if it can get even better than what it is now, I will be happy. For example, there should be an exact drilling down to any workload/any virtual machine/any identified issue. So, if an issue appears and there is latency, there could be a faster or easier way to know what the reason is and how we can resolve it with Nimble.

15 months

no issues

The product is very stable.

We are considering to scale it. We did consider it once and we might consider in the future as well. I had the impression that we can easily scale it.

very good

very good

We were using a different solution. I was visiting a specific software house conference (the software that we were using then), they had Nimble there and I was really interested; I asked them questions and then, eventually, it turned out into a project.

While selecting a vendor, I want to be sure that we are getting good value for money and having good performance; for me, that's the main priority.

The setup was very easy, it was a matter of a couple of hours.

the vendor came here at the very beginning and set all up

I looked at the traditional products out there and did a comparison with Nimble as well. For example, we compared EMC Storage with NimbLe and I also did consider SimpliVity, at the time but for this specific workload, it turned out that Nimble had the best approach.

Absolutely, try it out. For me, it was very easy because Nimble offered us to try and buy. They just came, set up the box, and I had a whole month's time to try it; it worked perfectly. For me, it was really easy.

It's definitely more of an appliance than a storage array in that sense. So from a "set it and forget it" mentality, it definitely is there.

Definitely ease-of-use. I've experienced many different arrays out there and Nimble is definitely there. The analytic side is very helpful on their info site. Integration with VMware is easy. There are not any additional appliance plug-ins to load beyond the basics. It works well.

I would like to see integration with OneView, at least for reporting or some sort of monitoring. Basic stuff like that would be nice. I can't think of any area that is lacking for what we use it for.

It is very stable.

I have used technical support. It is excellent. The best.

We have a slew of HPE products. Since we were a partner with Nimble prior to the acquisition, it was natural for us to use and sell their products.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very straightforward.

We only evaluated HPE. Our previous experience has a bearing on which vendor we choose. In terms of Nimble, I did a thorough technical evaluation and had discussions with the vendor and with Nimble themselves at the time. My questions were answered.

Try it. They have a VSA, so they have a virtual appliance. I don't know what the options are for testing it that way, but if there is an option to do a PoC, then give it a shot.