HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

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.

We use HPE Nimble Storage for general purposes, not for high performance, just for archiving and backup solutions.

It is easy to use. Not too complicated.

The scalability could be better.

I have been working with HPE Nimble Storage for three years.

We have no issues with the stability of this solution, it's stable enough.

HPE Nimble Storage does not scale well. It needs improvement.

We have 50 users in our organization who are using it.

Technical support is good. I would rate the support a nine out of ten.

The installation is straightforward.

We had the help of HP and other consultants, it took two days to install and deploy this solution.

We pay a one-time fee for terabyte licenses, and the support is paid yearly.

There are costs in addition to the licensing fee, but it's included in the hardware.

My recommendation of this solution would depend on who is interested in using it, and what the purpose of using it would be.

I would rate HPE Nimble Storage a six out of ten.

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.

We are resellers and HPE Nimble Storage is one of the products that we provide to our customers. We are not end-users of the solution.

The most valuable features are the HPE Performance Cluster Manager (HPCM) and InfoSight.

InfoSight is helpful because it is proactive support.

The stability can be improved.

I have been working with HPE Nimble Storage for approximately two years.

This product scales well.

The vendor has a lot of support available.

We also work with HPE Primera.

The initial setup is not complex at all. You can set it up in just a few minutes.

The pricing for this product is somewhat high.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is storage virtualization. We use it for public facing customer workloads.

We spend less time managing it.

The all-flash positions our organization for growth. It is much easier to use, and we do not have to worry about the I/O profile of the workloads that we putting on the array.

The solution has increased our throughput.

• Availability
• Ease of use
• Performance

The way the market is going, supporting NVMe storage would be useful as a step up.

The stability of the solution is fantastic.

The uptime is great.

The scalability is good. It is easy to scale out.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is as good as anyone else's that I have seen.

We find the support is pretty good. It is pretty easy to get a hold of the support team. They generally know what they are talking about.

The storage that we had was going out of support. We previously used mostly HPE 3PAR. We switched to Nimble mostly because it was simpler to administer. Also, the scale that we needed in Nimble was probably better suited for us than the 3PAR systems.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We deployed in-house.

I have not seen ROI.

The all-flash array has increased our performance. It has been good.

We buy the arrays outright, so we don't pay anything on an ongoing monthly basis for licensing.

We probably only looked at HPE and Nimble, and they are the same company now anyway.

If you are not going for the all-flash arrays, then try to understand your I/O profile and working set. That will help you with your sizing. 

Performance is great. It is still reasonably expensive, but the product is good. It does what it needs to.

From an availability viewpoint, it provides us with confidence that applications will be available when they need to be.

It does what it says on its own.

This is the SAN for our network. We house all of our network files here, as well as our virtual machines.

Nimble Storage is a great storage solution. It provided us a lot insight on the growth of our storage.

InfoSight: It lets us see what we might have to prepare for in the future. This feature has been a big help, especially since we have been recently looking to move on as our contract is almost up.

It is very pricey. You pay for what you get, and this storage solution is great. It is well worth the cost.

The most valuable features are ease of administration, stability, performance and customer support.

The SAN’s interface is easy to navigate. The processes to accomplish a task seem to have been constructed using the least number of clicks.

Performance of the SAN has been great due to the software algorithms for flash/spinner data writes/reads.

It reduced the complexity of managing multiple SANs.

The InfoSight continues to improve, but could use some more innovation.

We have used Nimble for 4+ years.

Our SANs have been extremely stable with only a few HDD failures over the past 3 years.

We have had no scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent; always reach skilled techs on first contact. Customer support is always available even with information accessible via documentation.

We previously used EMC. Storage administration was a nightmare in regards to LUN changes.

Setup was straightforward; intuitive.

It’s expensive, but worth it. Not much to say about licenses.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated Dell and EQL.

Take the time to purchase the proper head unit and port speeds.

Production Storage, all of our 200 virtual servers use this storage.

HPE Nimble Storage reach 4:1 compression/deduplicate rate, optimizing used space.

I have found the convergence rate and deduplication the most valuable features.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of HPE Nimble Storage has been good.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution and we do not plan to increase usage at this time.

The technical support is knowledgeable.

Previous solution had many licenses for each feature, with high OPEX and manage complexity.

The initial setup is simple compared to other solutions and it took approximately one month.

The resellers did the implementation of the solution, we did not do it ourselves. We have ten people for the deployment of the solution.

There is a monthly fee to use the solution.

Yes, Lenovo and DELL/EMC storages.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage a ten out of ten.