HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

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.

We use Nimble Storage to virtualize several specialized workloads. 

Nimble's phone-home capability is decent. The compression, dedupe, and caching are also solid. Generally, I like the simplicity. It's almost a set-and-forget solution.

Nimble Storage could increase its flexibility by adding more protocol options. Nimble mainly uses fibre channel protocols, whereas many other storage arrays support fibre channel, iCSI, and NFS protocols.

I have used Nimble Storage for more than eight years. 

I rate Nimble Storage eight out of 10 for stability.

I rate Nimble Storage seven out of 10 for scalability. I have used it for organizations with user bases ranging from 500 to 3,000.

I rate HPE customer service eight out of 10.

Positive

The other product we used was no longer available, so we switched to the next-best solution. 

I rate Nimble Storage seven out of 10 for ease of setup. It's relatively straightforward. We've deployed it ourselves, but we had professional services do it a few times. It went smoothly both ways. Deployment takes about a week. 

I rate Nimble Storage seven out of 10 for affordability. The price could be improved. We aren't using the subscription-based version, so we are fully on-prem with a five-year support license. 

We evaluated a few vendors, including Dell EMC, NetApp, and IBM. Nimble Storage delivered the most bang for our buck. It was also relatively simple to deploy. 

I rate HPE Nimble Storage seven out of 10. It's a good solution, but there are other options. I would recommend it, depending on your workloads. 

I primarily use the solution for storage. 

It has a dual power supply. Whenever I want to upgrade, it's got a pack of power with the network and everything. It's got zero downtime.

It's very easy, very compatible, and user-friendly. 

You don't have to do anything. When you power up, it'll ask you a couple of questions. For example, what IP address is required, the name, and how many partitions or, if you don't do the partition, just go for the IP addresses. 

It has a power backup network card and everything.

You don't have to go directly to the storage to create anything. It's automatically from the VM or any other software. Whatever you are using, you just create storage over there or in space, and it automatically creates it in the Nimble.

It has SSD cache and it has a physical drive as well. It is fast. It'll automatically sense your data. Whatever data you are pulling frequently, it'll store in that cache instead of storing directly on the hard drive to pull or store that. It is a very good feature.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It is scalable. 

It's stable. 

I don't find anything that is needed in terms of improvement. They are now gradually upgrading everything and are more powerful than we have.

It was a bit expensive.

I've used the solution for a year. 

The stability has been good. I would rate it eight out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We do not have plans to increase usage at this time.

It can scale, however. I'd rate the scalability eight out of ten. 

Technical support is good. Nimble talks directly with the HB, the heartbeat. Nimble sends its heartbeat to the support team every day, every hour, whatever the schedule is. If anything happens, it automatically will open a ticket without calling me. They call you back and will fix the issue for you.

We've also used Dell storage solutions. They were not pure storage, however. 

It is a straightforward solution to set up. 

HPE came and racked the solution for us. That's all we needed. 

We have witnessed an ROI while using this solution. 

The solution is a bit expensive. I would rat the pricing six out of ten in terms of affordability. 

We did evaluate a few other options. However, we found HPE to be the best. 

I'd advise other potential users not to go anywhere else and just use Nimble. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Our Nimble unit serves our corporate storage infrastructure, all running VMware on top of it. It's primarily VDI file storage and the virtual environment itself.

We have been using it for about three years and the performance has been excellent. We haven't had any outages.

Our upgrades are seamless. Whether we're adding storage, or upgrading the software, we don't take an outage for those upgrades.

Also, InfoSight does exactly what it needs to do. It tells us when we have problems and if we need to move things around. Mostly we use it for capacity planning so we can get the forecast of when we're going to be out of space and order more disk expansion before we run out of actual space.

The only thing that I can really compare Nimble to is all-flash because, right now, Nimble is a hybrid solution. I would like to see them come out with an all-flash alternative.

I'd also like to see them incorporate tools that let me get granular with the VMs. I want to see an individual VM, I want to Snapshot and recover an individual VM. Those are the kind of daily operations features that I'd like to see.

Stability is great. We have never had a problem with the arrays.

In terms of scalability, it's excellent. I think we have four of them now.

We have used technical support. Everything has been solved really quickly. Because I'm the vice president, I don't do the engineer's work but I would hear about it if there was a problem.

In terms of how technical support compares to support provided by other companies, our other source product is EMC and it's very difficult to be worse than EMC.

The switch was because of budgetary constraints. I knew I couldn't put in an EMC array in the initial solution that we used before, which was for VDI. If I had tried to deal with the EMC, I would not have gotten the performance and it would have cost a lot more. 

So we had to look outside the box. We chose Nimble over Tintri at the time, because Tintri's solution, while very good - with the things I was talking about, like granular VM, etc. - it's a footprint that you have to buy all at once. For the Nimble, I buy the unit and I can keep adding to it. With Tintri you have to pick a 13-terabyte or a 45-terabyte and when you run out of that, you buy another 45-terabyte. To me, it just didn't seem as expandable.

In terms of criteria for selecting a vendor, other than scalability and price, the key is performance. The bar was set at EMC. EMC just adds flash disks to a standard array and accelerates things somewhat, but it really doesn't get you to where you need to be. With EMC, you need to buy a lot of disks, you need to get into the 200s for spindle count. With any of the newer hybrid solutions - Tintri, Nimble, Pure - those are all all-flash solutions or hybrid solutions that take advantage of flash the way it's supposed to be.

I'm based out of Southern California. We first implemented it in Virginia, so I flew in to meet an engineer to complete it. By the time I had flown in and got to the data center, he was already done. I expected it to take several hours but it was more like an hour, and most of that hour was unpacking it out of the box.

Compared to EMC, you can't install EMC's products yourself, and it's days of implementation.

If we had stuck with EMC, we would have spent a lot more. We have EMC in-house, we have a bunch of them. Switching to Nimble saved me millions of dollars over the past three years.

Our production environment runs off of Pure Storage, our corporate environment runs off of Nimble.

I'd put Nimble at about an eight out of 10 because Pure storage reset our standard for what is absolutely the best. Pure is a whole different platform and not hybrid. I like Nimble, it's very good, it works, it's definitely cost-effective. It's not all-flash, so you don't get the performance of all-flash. But if you don't have a couple of million dollars to spend on Pure, Nimble is an excellent choice.

In terms of advice, it gets down to budget. Nimble fills a need for performance within a budget that is in the sub-million dollar range. If you're going up over a million dollars, where you can just throw money at the solution, there is Pure and there is Texas Memory Systems and all those high-end solutions. But if you want enterprise-level storage and you want a hybrid, the Nimble has served us well.

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.

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.

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're a reseller. We're a managed security agency. 

Our clients need fast storage. They run VM environments on it.

The interaction with VMware is most valuable. 

Its pricing could be better. It's expensive.

In terms of features, it just works. It's in there, and it just keeps working. I don't spend a lot of time actively interacting with the Nimble environment, and there aren't any particular features that I want to see because it just works. I don't have any use cases where it's falling short.

I've been using this solution for three years.

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

At this stage, I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of scalability. I know it can scale up a lot, but I haven't had to do it, so I don't have firsthand experience with it.

In terms of the size of our clients, it's New Zealand. A medium business is probably about five hundred users.

It's integrated with HPE InfoSight, so if there are any alerts, HPE gets advised at the same time we do. It's incredibly simple for me to log a ticket because I just click log ticket from within InfoSight, and people get back to me and fix it. It's very simple.

I'd rate their support a 10 out of 10. They've always been excellent.

Positive

It was all fantastic because HPE came out and built and deployed the entire environment. Configuration was very easy because we didn't have to do anything. HPE aided it all.

I'd rate its setup a ten out of ten in terms of ease because we didn't have to do anything. All we did was pay for HPE to come on-site and build everything. It took two weeks.

It's expensive. It could be cheaper. I'd rate it a five out of ten in terms of pricing.

We're on a yearly licensing. I haven't come across any additional costs. We just paid for three-year support.

Make sure you scale it correctly the first time. Just make sure you're very aware of your own environment and exactly what you're going to be running.

I'd rate it a solid nine out of ten.