HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

It's a fairly standard nimble storage array.

We use HPE Nimble Storage as our typical SAN for virtual environment storage and shared storage.

The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies.

You could argue that it would be preferable if everything were cheaper in order to save taxpayer money. While that would be nice, they are comparable to what else is available on the market and they are competitive.

We have been working with HPE Nimble Storage for 18 months.

HPE Nimble Storage is a stable product.

HPE Nimble Storage is a scalable solution.

We currently serve up to 375 users. There is also one primary administrator and two secondary administrators.

My recollection is that there was a question in the beginning, and we contacted technical support; everything was fine. Excellent.

Previously, we were using Dell EqualLogic's PS series. We have since removed that from our environment and moved to another storage platform. We switched to the other platform in late 2020. We switched to HPE Nimble Storage.

The initial setup wasn't particularly difficult.

We simply migrated storage volumes from the EqualLogic's, had new ones built in the nimble array, and shifted everything over. There was nothing out of the ordinary.

It does not require a lot of maintenance.

I believe the array, maintenance, and everything totaled around $140,000 dollars.

Certainly, in comparison to what we would have had to consider in order to achieve an equivalent storage capacity with the EqualLogic's end of life, we would have had to migrate to EMC or another platform. It was going to be at least $200,000, and most likely closer to $300,000.

We don't have any extraordinary requirements. We simply require a large amount of shared storage. It's perfectly functional. 

It integrates well with VMware, as do the majority of the products. We are not doing anything exceptional.

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

Availability of our environment has exceeded “five nines”, along with performance being stellar.

Performance, reliability, InfoSight, the ability to upgrade the O/S on the SAN without taking it down, and cost.

Poor performance and reliability would adversely affect my company’s productivity, and thus would increase overall labor costs as people took longer to do their jobs. (Especially if and when critical systems were down due to an outage.) It would also negatively affect employee and customer perception of the quality of IT services.

InfoSight is extremely valuable, because it gives us (IT) a direct understanding of historical performance and capacity trends, including projected utilization based on those trends. This in turn allows us to perform capacity planning before we reach the point where it becomes an issue. Further, some of the information in InfoSight gives us a direct understanding of which of our virtual servers is the most I/O bound. That allows us to investigate the server and mitigate disk traffic through configuration changes at the server level.

Regarding uninterrupted upgrades, one of the biggest problems with upgrading SANs is the fact that (except for Nimble!) you have to take down the SAN to do so. This requires the quiescence of any servers relying on that storage, and thus a service stoppage. While this can be done on a scheduled basis as “scheduled downtime”, the fact that Nimble permits us to upgrade transparently WITHOUT service interruption not only improves perceptions of IT, but it also changes what is normally a multi-hour process into a 30 minute process… saving time and money.

Right now, all Nimble arrays offer data compression to disk, but only the Flash (SSD) arrays offer in-line deduplication. I’d like to see in-line deduplication extended to Nimble non-flash (called “Hybrid”) arrays, even if it’s only the C500 and higher controllers that support it.

While I speak about “five nines”, the truth is we’ve had 100% up-time (no outages, not even planned) for over 3 years.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is extraordinary. Their technical support often helps us with VMware issues and related products when the issue isn’t with their SAN – which is almost always true.

We used NetApp. We switched due to performance and manageability requirements. NetApp was simply an average performer, and managing it was difficult.

The SAN setup itself was simple and easy. The biggest challenge we had was in changing our network to accommodate turning off Spanning Tree Protocol for that segment.

If you evaluate a SAN based on total cost of ownership, you have to consider the cost to the company for down time and maintenance windows, among other things. Their price structure for purchase and pricing for maintenance is excellent. Just as importantly, there are no “additional software modules” to buy at an added price. You get everything up front.

From a price/performance perspective, Nimble simply can’t be beat. From a TCO perspective, the stability alone pays for itself.

We evaluated offerings from IBM, HP, EMC, and a number of smaller vendors, such as AppAssure.

Be prepared for your staff to want to abandon all other SAN’s you may have in place. Make sure your network and network switches are capable of handling the performance, because it would be a shame to buy something so incredibly fast only to choke it down on the Ethernet side of things.

We used HPE Nimble Storage for several purposes. Primarily, it served as our storage solution. 

Additionally, we employed it for disk-based backups. We also had a tape system in place and HPE Nimble Storage integrated seamlessly with our HPE Synergy infrastructure. 

I appreciate its batch capabilities, the capacity is important, and the DriveTape support. They offer hybrid support, which I like.

It could be more cost-effective. For customers with budget constraints, I recommend HPE Nimble Storage. That's one of the reasons I favor it.

The performance is good, but it can depend on the specific data or database. Typically, companies using HPE Nimble Storage fall within a certain range. Overall, that's a strong aspect of the solution.

HPE Nimble Storage's predictive analytics are adequate, but not exceptional.

I have been using it for a couple of months. But it has been in my company even before I joined. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. I had some issues. 

The customer service and support are good. 

The initial setup was straightforward. When we deployed it, we used HPE Synergy for computing and HPE Nimble Storage for cloud storage. 

We also integrated a backup server into the bundle. Once everything was connected, we were able to start using it.

In general, I would rate it a nine out of ten. I would recommend using it since it is HPE product. 

It's important to first determine your priorities. When deciding to use HPE Nimble Storage, consider whether you need an all-flash solution or a hybrid option. 

They offer both types, so you can choose based on your requirements. That flexibility is a key advantage for customers.e 

We use the solution for customer data storage.

The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs.

HPE Nimble Storage should improve its latency. It is expensive.

I have been using the product since 2001.

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

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool's ease of deployment a nine out of ten. Its deployment took around three months to complete.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage's pricing an eight out of ten. It can be expensive, especially when considering console ports and renewals.

The tool is better than any other data storage. HPE Nimble Storage is recommended for enterprise. I would recommend it to others and rate it a seven out of ten overall.

We use it to extend the data center a little further. We have videos which are very large in size and which cannot be compressed. We ran out of space in the data center so we moved the media data center and expanded it. The videos are a business-critical application. We provide videos for students to access 24/7.

We feel that we can rely on this solution more for the business-critical applications we have, compared to what we had earlier.

Also, the all-flash positions our organization for growth. Video quality keeps increasing. From 4K we are now moving to 8K and we expect that the size of each video file is going to grow very high. So our data size is increasing very fast.

In addition, we have noticed that the solution has increased performance.

We like the performance.

I would like to see more integrations. They might already have them, but I want to integrate it with the different hardware we have.

We moved to this solution for the stability. We had an HPE consultant configuring it and we went through some of those features that it enables. We also like the cloud-ready portion and when we move to the cloud that will be used as another factor in justifying our decision.

In terms of scalability, when I said "cloud," that was one of the things that we looked at when considering how we would grow, how we would expand. We are still evaluating. We do have some cloud storage, but we want to have one solution for that. We definitely think that with this product's features, we can go into the cloud and scale to whatever we like.

Technical support has been good so far. We had one issue up til now, but we are good. They took care of it.

We had legacy storage and my team recommended that we had to move to something new.

The initial setup was straightforward. We estimated, in the beginning, that we could do it over the weekend, and it went as we planned. We didn't see any issues.

We had an HPE consultant. Our experience was good.

We haven't evaluated ROI yet.

We had Dell EMC, as well as the company that was originally Sun Microsystems. We also had a couple of startups. We went with HPE mostly because of the familiarity and because my team recommended it because of its performance.

We like the flexibility. Anybody who is looking for a product that is easy to use and deploy, this is good.

I do need to evaluate the security aspect of it, especially intelligence to counter any unpredictable growth. I would also like to see how to use the storage space efficiently, because we do, at times, suddenly come across big videos.

It is our primary source platform. It underlines all of our Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 applications. We use hybrid, not flash.

It has reduced the requirement to have a specialist storage engineer.

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.

It has stabilized throughput and provided less downtime for our applications.

• Simplicity of use
• Maintenance

I would like to have integration into cloud providers, apart from HPE.

The release cycle for the firmware upgrades could be improved. They are a bit long.

It's very stable. It is 100 percent up.

It's very scalable. We can scale it up and down.

We haven't had to increase capacity.

The technical support is fantastic.

The existing SAN was no longer a fit for purpose.

The initial setup was incredibly simple. It was up and running within half an hour.

We deployed it in-house.

It has increased our performance and allowed us to expand out what we can deliver.

Definitely, give the product a go and do a PoC.

It fits my needs perfectly.

Biggest lesson learnt: Sometimes, the simplest solution is actually a complex solution.

HPE Nimble Storage is mainly SAN-based, dual-controller-based, and two-node-based storage. It's for only a SAN-based solution. HPE Nimble Storage is a unified solution that you can use on-premises and deploy on the public cloud.

You can remotely manage the solution from anywhere. Compared to other vendors like Dell, IBM, and Supermicro, HPE Nimble Storage is very easy to deploy. The solution is plug-and-play, where you can buy a chassis and upgrade an existing chassis. You can use OneView to deploy, configure, and manage HPE Nimble Storage.

HPE Nimble Storage is a very organized and customer-oriented tool. Its support service is very good worldwide.

Most customers in the Bangladesh market want a hybrid solution that has both SAN-based and NAS-based storage. HPE Nimble Storage provides only SAN-based storage and does not support NAS-based storage.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for seven years.

The solution provides good data availability and performance.

I rate the solution’s stability ten out of ten.

Around 300 users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

Customers can create tickets for their issues, and the technical support team provides support.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is very easy. A non-IT person can also use a manual to deploy HPE Nimble Storage.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten.

Dell is the main competitor for HPE Nimble Storage. Dell has a hybrid solution that supports both SAN-based and NAS-based storage. However, HPE Nimble Storage doesn't have a hybrid solution that supports both SAN-based and NAS-based storage.

You can upgrade the solution to 45 drives, including NVMe, SaaS, SSD, and other existing infrastructure. Then, you can integrate with an additional chassis and upgrade 400 drives. A backup solution is integrated with the solution by default.

HPE Nimble Storage has already integrated InfoSight, a predictive analytics feature that detects failure. When your storage's hard disk consumes 70% to 80%, it automatically generates an alert to replace your hard disk. This is done by AI, which has already been integrated into HPE Nimble Storage.

When your hard disk fails, HPE Nimble Storage automatically creates a case and mails it to the HPE portal and distributor.

I would recommend the solution to users who have a lot of processes, use frequently hit software, and maximum read-intensive users. The solution is ideal for financial institutes and banks where the transaction process is very high.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use Nimble for both our primary storage and for VDI.

It has improved our ability to deliver care to patients quickly. Our previous arrays, they were having a lot of slowness issues and that was impacting the way that our providers were giving patient care. It has really helped us keep up and keep our users happy, and keep our patients safe and healthy.

Ease of installation, it's very easy to set up, to get up and running. It works well, I don't have any issues with it. Also, they have unparalleled customer support. You call in and you talk to a technician who knows what he's doing and can typically solve your problem on that call.

I use InfoSight quite a bit. It works well. It allows you to get some insight into what's happening in your environment immediately, instead of having to send things off and having them analyzed and sent back to you.

The only thing I'm really looking for in my next array is some hyperconverged, so if they had something in that space... But I know they have SimpliVity so that is probably not going to happen.

It's very stable. As far as staying up, we're a hospital, we run 24/7, 365 days a year. We can't afford to be down and it has been completely stable. Even through upgrades, there is no downtime, not even a hiccup for users.

I don't know how far up it scales. It certainly scales up far enough for our needs. We're not a huge environment so it meets all of our needs.

With the array we had, the maintenance contract was over and it was going to cost us a lot to continue support on it. Plus, we were having a lot of latency issues with it and a lot of complaints from users. We had a lot of support calls. We did a PoC on the Nimble and we were able to immediately show that it would improve our performance.

Our criteria when evaluating vendors include ease of use, something with a good management interface that doesn't require plug-ins or Java or Flash, so having the HTML5 interface was ideal. I really looked for something that would give me insight into what was happening on the array in my stack. With other arrays I've had in the past, it was really hard to pinpoint whether it was a storage issue, or a server issue, or a network issue. I also wanted an all-flash solution because I had tried some tiered storage before and it never seemed to have the data in the right tier. I had flash storage but what needed to be running fast wasn't in flash, it was on SATA and performance would take a hit.

We went with Nimble because it fit all our criteria. Also, the sales team was great and the fact that they offer free training is awesome. There are not very many vendors that do that. Doing our PoC really proved that it was the product that we needed to fill our needs.

The setup was very straightforward. It was the quickest array I've ever set up in my life. Other systems, I sometimes spent a month getting them up and configured. With help from support and technicians onsite, my SE from Nimble came out, I had it up and running in 10 minutes and moved production loads over to it.

We saw a really quick return on investment with it because of the issues that we were having. We were able to reduce our support calls by about 70 percent. And on top of that our staff's time - the ability to take care of patient faster. I would say within three months or we got ROI on it.

We looked at EMC, Pure Storage, and VxRail.

Look at the portfolio and decide what meets your needs because there is a wide range of performance that you can get out there. I've been burned before, a little bit, on some of the lower-performance arrays. You get them in there and within three months you have already maxed out the performance. So make sure you buy what you need. Get something that's going to be upgradable and last.

Nimble has really met all of our needs and at a price we could afford. It certainly wasn't as expensive as a lot of other all-flash solutions that we could have bought. It does what we need it to do. It's expandable, everything is built into it, you don't have to go by other agents to do things, the replication is built in.