HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• Ease-of-use: You don't have to be a storage expert to navigate and set up the product.
• Reliability: If there are any issues with the product, their support team calls me before I even notice that there is an issue. They're very proactive.

With our previous storage product, I would probably spend 2-4 hours a week managing it, logging, checking on things, and fixing issues. Since we've switched to Nimble, I probably spend an hour a month doing various maintenance tests. It has greatly reduced the amount of handling that our storage requires.

Third-party integrations: A lot of products tend to come out and support NetApp, EMC, and various other storage managers. Nimble tends to be lagging behind in that space, and it's not completely their fault, but I think they could do a better job pushing for those integrations with various third-party products.

We have used the solution for a little over two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues, as it's very scalable.

The level of technical support is 10/10.

We were on NetApp previously. It was too cumbersome to manage. Their support was atrocious, and they were really expensive.

The setup was the easiest thing I've ever done in my life. We had it unboxed, uncrated, racked, and connected to VMware in probably two hours, tops.

Their pricing window was more straightforward than in traditional storage. They have basically guaranteed maintenance pricing. In years four, five, six, and beyond, they don't force you to upgrade like some of the other vendors.

The license is straightforward and it's all inclusive. There's no need to buy different license keys to get access to certain features. What you pay for, and you pay one price, you get it all.

We looked at everybody on the market.

Don't be hesitant, and trust their technology, because it works. Just because they don't have the market share of NetApp and EMC, isn't a reason to overlook them.

I use HPE Nimble Storage for Hyper-V clusters. I'm using the latest OS and the latest firmware. I keep them updated.

It keeps my machines up and running. For deduplications, it's a pretty good machine.

Deduplication is probably the most valuable feature. It's very easy to set up. It's very stable, and it has got great deduplication, especially for hypervisor users.

There should be faster interfaces.

It would be nice if you could use something other than the proprietary rights on it.

I've been using HPE Nimble Storage for about a year and a half.

I'd rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability. I haven't had any issues.

I'd rate it a ten out of ten in terms of scalability.

I'd rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

It was easy, but I've been doing it for twenty years. I'm not worried about that. 

We have absolutely seen an ROI.

Its price is a little higher.

I'd rate HPE Nimble Storage a ten out of ten.

We are using HPE Nimble Storage of backing up our data.

HPE Nimble Storage is quick to release updates that fix bugs or problems and the failover has been good.

The solution could improve by having more granularity. For example, having the ability to go deeper into specific IO channels or specific latency issues that can happen would be a benefit. HPE has this ability on their side but it would be useful to have it on our side.

Replication reporting is a bit difficult to figure out and could improve in the future. It would be helpful if they had a breakdown detailed report that one could provide to upper management.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for approximately 

The support is very good at being proactive in helping us resolve issues. They have been better than most other competitors in this area.

It is a sound solution and we have not had many issues.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage a nine out of ten.

The biggest thing from when they have replaced the old storage is that they have not had to touch it. That once it is set up it, it dynamically understands what data is being stored on it and where to store it, because they have got a flash array at the front, then obviously the standard style of storage at the back. There was not a lot of configuration needed to make it understand what their business was about and how it worked. It was just a big plus that once it was in, they more or less could forget about it.

It allowed them to concentrate on other projects that were obviously important for growing their business rather than having to worry about managing the storage, which is what they used to do with all their old storage.

Before HPE bought Nimble, we had a couple of customers that use it quite extensively, not just for storage of data, but also as their backup solution as well. So, we have found the advantage of it is the easy, rapid setup, but also that it is very easy to manage. 

Their remote management and understanding when things are starting to go wrong and their ability to fix them before the customer even knows, this has been a big positive when a customer makes the decision to go with Nimble.

The backup solution that they are using now probably has not been deduped. I think this is probably sort of one area that the customer is a little bit concerned about. It is a timing issue for them, though it is still working at the moment. It is just not giving them enough header space that they thought they would have because the dedupe does not seem to be working as well as it could. So, it is something that needs to be reviewed and to make sure the customer has not clicked a certain feature. 

I know for a fact that once they get in touch with HPE or Nimble, they will obviously look at the box remotely, see where there are potentially fine tunings, and if it is just a question of the customer having time to allow them to come online and review it, hopefully it will get solved.

Apart from that, everything else has been positive.

The occasional disk here and there goes. However, they turn up and swap the disk before you even know it. So, stability has been very good in that sense.

We have added a couple of shelves over the years to the product already. We still have capacity to add one more shelf to it, but obviously the product changes and develops all the time and allows the expansion, then you still have the ability to pull out the main engines and replace the controller cards on the actual box itself. You know you have a growth area forward in the product. It is not as if you have to throw it away and start again, when you hit the capacity. That was another advantage, it was easy to upgrade.

I can only really sort of comment when it was Nimble, because obviously HPE has only owned them for a few months now. From both a pre-sales and post-sales, I have always found them really good. They are very professional, know their products, know what they do, and very informative in terms of keeping the customer updated. For me, it is always just been a positive, which would be why I would always recommend them on to other clients, because of that.

Our customers have been looking at 3PAR, but:

• It is too expensive.
• It was not automated enough, in the way that Nimble is.

It is sort of one of those decisions that it is quite easy to make in terms of the Nimble solution for money for storage size regarding which is more cost effective. Also, the ability to set it up and more or less leave it alone to run itself. It is a big positive. 

• Easy management (and easy management during the lifetime of the product) translates into savings. Therefore, it’s important for us.
• Speed and price: Nimble Storage is simply the most speed and space for the least price. No other product comes close.

We now need fewer hands to manage storage. Nimble has incredible speed and stability.

It’s just perfect the way it is!

Nonetheless, it would be nice to have:

• I need a real API (REST), and Nimble Storage made a REST for me (and all the other customers), so the product is perfect for me! Most of the other roadmap features do not interest me.
• It would be nice to have a ”virtual Nimble Storage box” in the cloud, so that I can replicate data to the cloud (and clone VMs and spin them up). This is in the roadmap.
• I also want replicated snapshots on CHEAP space in the cloud (like Amazon Glacier).

I have used it for more than 3 years.

I have encountered no stability issues.

I have encountered no scalability issues.

Their technical support is the best support that I ever had, and it's free!

We used NetApp. Nimble Storage is a better block storage than NetApp on every single parameter.

Initial setup is very straightforward. Nimble helped us install the first array during the PoC and we installed the rest of the system.

There is no licensing, only an up-front price (and service and support) and the price is cheap for the speed and volume.

We evaluated Violin, and it was much too expensive and not that much faster.

Buy Nimble Storage!

Great performance and capacity in just 3U. Volume collections with crash-consistent snapshots every 4th hour, without using up too much disk space (thanks to indexing and redirect-on-write).

Our hosting environment (VMware ESX-based) got a nice boost thanks to these products. We were able to decommission a whole rack of old FC SAN arrays (HPE EVA4400) and replace it with just a CS300 (3U). Lower disk latency and a whole lot greater IOPS values as well.

Perhaps more stability to the InfoSight VMVision feature. A couple of times last year, this feature had stop working for us.

Well, Nimble Storage have had some difficulties/interference during this year with their predictive analytics service InfoSight. Read more about it here: https://www.nimblestorage.com/...

(almost) every Nimble array in the world reports back to InfoSight with data and statistics about the VM’s and connected hosts, which InfoSight automatically analyses and presenting it in a neat way for the user. A very good service and a matter affect, recently (the last couple of weeks) it have worked flawlessly, and hopefully this will continue.

One and a half years.

Other than InfoSight VMVision, no.

No issues.

Magnificent. Quick response and assistance when adding a support case. Even if you create a case at 11:00 PM, or during the weekend, you will get a response shortly after posting the case.

Yes, we were using both older equipment (HPE EVA4400) and newer equipment (HPE 3PAR). The EVA4400 is now decommissioned, thanks to our Nimble array. Greater performance and capacity are the two main reasons that we switched to Nimble.

Very straightforward, no difficulties at all.

Unlike HPE 3PAR, there is no licensing jungle to find your way out of.

No. We got a PoC array delivered to us first, that got us convinced about the product.

If you're currently looking for a new storage solution in your environment, give Nimble Storage a chance. I can promise you, you won't be disappointed.

• The product is easy and quick to implement
• Licensing is easy to understand and doesn’t require a license for each feature that they offer
• SSD for cache
• Great technical support
• Monitoring of components and quick replacements if they fail
• Can update firmware and OS without taking SAN offline

The organization is now able to take advantage of the benefits offered by virtualization such as vMotion. The storage is now able to support the required IOPs for all of our applications.

I haven't come across any so far.

I've used it for 10 months.

No issues encountered.

The product has been extremely stable so far.

We have not yet had the need to scale.

10/10.

10/10.

Prior to this, we were using storage on our servers.

It was very straightforward. The initial setup can be completed in less than hour as long as all of the network configurations have been completed.

It was in-house.

Price is comparable to other vendors’ products in the same class. The licensing is extremely easy to understand compared to some of the other vendors. Nimble doesn’t require separate licenses for each feature that they offer.

• EMC
• EqualLogic
• NetApp

Nimble offers solid products, are very easy to implement, and offer great performance.