HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We primarily use it for storage.

The capacity for data storage and compression is good.

I would like to see some additional features included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for the past eight months.

It was on track, but I have problems with the next servicer. For example, I have a new device and it needs to connect to Nimble. 

I do not pay for it.

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

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 currently work with banks and insurance companies, who are our primary customers with regard to HPE Nimble Storage.

Our clients have been very happy with this solution and like the fact that it is very easy to install. They have also had no problems with migration.

The fact that you can manage the requirements is one the most valuable features of HPE Nimble Storage. The other is the rapid deployment time.

Our customers are also happy that they can easily manage the requirements from the very beginning.

I think the scalability of HPE Nimble Storage could be improved.

In Venezuela, we have to purchase the solution for two years and cannot obtain a secondary storage platform. So from my perspective, the scalability is not as easy as that of 3PAR StoreServ or HPE Primera.

I have used this solution for two years.

Our clients have not reported any issues, so I think that HPE Nimble Storage is very stable.

The scalability of this solution is not great in comparison to that of 3PAR StoreServ or HPE Primera.

Most of our clients used 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera.

The initial setup is very easy.

I think HPE Nimble Storage is less expensive than Primera and is the best solution for Venezuela. 

Our clients evaluated other options such as 3PAR StoreServ, HPE Primera, Pure Storage, and Dell EMC.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate HPE Nimble Storage at nine. It is less expensive than some of the other options and is very easy to install.

We use HPE Nimble for deduplication and to compress data.

We have a large number of customers that rely on high availability from this product.

The deduplication and compression capabilities are powerful. We see deduplication savings ratios at ten to one, and twenty to one.

For me, Nimble has two main problems.

There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time. Replacing the controller is what I see as the only major issue, although I'm not sure that HPE can do this.

Nimble has a limit for objects. We have it configured for VMware, so if you have a laptop machine then you have a problem because of this limit. Also, if you have a virtual desktop with a lot of VMs, such as 2,000 to 3,000, then it's a problem because the window has a limit.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for more than two years.

Nimble is a stable product.

Scalability-wise, it is very good.

I have been in contact with technical support and I would rate them an eight or nine out of ten. They are very good.

I am also using HPE 3PAR.

I also have experience with HPE Primera, which is a better product. It's a merge of 3PAR and Nimble and it's a more stable storage solution.

If I were comparing a group of products then I would rate StorageWorks MSA a five, Nimble a seven, 3PAR an eight, Primera a nine, and StorageWorks XP a ten.

The initial setup is very simple, and in fact, the simplest of these solutions.

It takes approximately four hours to deploy including hooking up power, cabling, getting it set up on the rack, and configuration.

Deployment and maintenance are done in-house.

We keep the versions updated.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are resellers. We provide products to our customers.

Unfortunately, we were not able to sell this product because it is too expensive. We use it in our own cloud. We created a VMware VCPP cloud to provide VMware services to our enterprise customers.

The performance and the processor are good.

HPE has very good technology in terms of storage, and they have very good support assistance.

The problem is the price. It needs to be improved.

I would like to see an added feature to auto-fix, or a dynamic alerting system on storage. This is very important because we would like to prevent a disk failure before it happens.

If we had some sort of AI in place to alert us then we could replace the disk before it occurs.

Also, we would like to receive alerts if space is over the limits. This is necessary for us.

I have been selling HPE Nimble Storage for a few months.

It's very stable.

It's a scalable product. We have one POC user in our organization.

Technical support is good. HPE has a good channel system in Taiwan.

Previously, we used Dell.

Nimble Storage is too expensive for our enterprise customers.

We are still trying other products. HPE GreenLake has very nice packaging. It's a financial program, and we used Nimble through this financing program. We didn't purchase it, we were testing. 

We are still testing other products, such as Dell Storage.

We have some local storage vendors, so we are not formally using it in production.

We are not able to recommend this product as we are still in the testing phase. We are still doing the POC tests.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The device works very well.

We like how we can report and access everything directly over the cloud.

The solution runs pretty fast.

The solution requires a higher availability.

The pricing of the solution isn't ideal. They should work to make it more affordable. It's very expensive.

I'd like to be able to configure the solution from vCenter, which isn't possible right now.

It would be great if the solution offered even more integrations and plugins.

We've been using the solution for three years.

The solution is very stable. It's been working for three years, and we haven't had any errors. There aren't crashes. There isn't any bug or glitch that affects the way it functions.

The scalability is good. It's easy to expand the solution as needed.

We have around 1,000 people working with the solution currently. We use it quite extensively.

The technical support is really good. They give us adapted support and it's very helpful. We're satisfied with the level of support we get.

I have experience with a few different solutions. Nimble is quite a large solution that runs well without errors. One of its competitors, NetApp, is good but hard to configure. You need to really be an expert to configure it. With Nimble, you don't have to be overly technical. 

I've also worked with Huawei devices in the past as well.

The solution has an easy initial setup. It was straightforward. We didn't find it to be complex. You don't need advanced knowledge, or to be an expert.

Deployment is pretty quick and takes just 25 minutes. It's really quite fast.

We had three team members deploy the solution. They also maintain it. They were all part of the administration team.

We were able to install the solution ourselves without any outside help. We didn't need any help from an integrator or consultant.

The solution is quite expensive. We can't really afford to buy a second device.

We've recently been looking at Pure Storage.

We're currently using model CS5000 and we're on version 5.05.200.

We are not yet on the cloud. We're on-premise. We installed it in our data center. In tests and features, they call it InfoSight. InfoSight collects logs and tries to send to the cloud. It's customizable, and it offers reports for you and any upgrade. It tries to give you information about your device.

I'd recommend the solution. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

Our primary use of this solution is to host business-critical applications in the cloud for customers.

We can have fewer resources manning and monitoring the storage and we can reallocate resources to work on other things while maintaining confidence in our storage solution.

We have successfully integrated various applications such as SAP Business One, Microsoft Dynamics GP, any of the ERP systems we have tried work.

The Nimble Storage solution has enhanced performance over the previous system.

I haven't got the details of the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) so I don't know it exactly, but definitely performance on the service is much better.

The most valuable feature for our organization is that the solution provides us access to the storage we need without having to have multiple storage experts on staff to address changing storage needs.

As far as what future versions of the product should include, I don't have any experience with what it is lacking. It is really up to the technical guys to determine what is potentially missing from the solution.

The uptime for the solution is excellent. So far, so good.

While we have not had the need to scale yet and we haven't utilized it, it does seem like the utility should scale up quite easily.

The storage capacity efficiency is decent. We get about 2.1 dedupe capabilities using the solution.

Our experiences with technical support have proven to be excellent so far.

We previously used a different solution and knew we needed to change our solution to provide storage for our virtualization. The storage solution we had previously could not provide this and so it was not adequate. It was a rented system from another company and we were not happy with the performance.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. However, we did need to ask some questions to understand how they do the LANs and other technical details of it. There were no major stumbling blocks.

We didn't use a vendor or reseller to deploy. We implemented the solution ourselves.

Our return on investment appears to be excellent. The product delivers a lot of return to our company in various ways.

We purchased the solution for something in the $80,000 range. It was a fixed-price option.

We had a couple of options that we were considering before going with Nimble. We also looked at some of the offerings from Dell. I think those were the two main ones. There was a third one, Tintri, which we were not happy with because of their bankruptcy filings. Nimble was the leading option coming out of the gate and ended up being the solution we selected.

On a scale of one to ten, I would say this product is a nine. I think it does what it promises and support is decent. The only drawback I find is the size of the components. They never told us that the hardware has a large form factor and we were barely able to squeeze it into our older racks.

Storage is a critical piece of our business and, with a small team like the one that we have, Nimble ends up being a pretty good system that fits our need while lowering administrative needs.

For anyone considering this solution seriously, I would suggest you do your research with other competitors out there and look at what you are using, what type of infrastructure you have, as well as resources you have to support your system. Based on that, I would do a small POC (Proof of Concept). The flash version is more expensive, but I think you can get away with this with a hybrid model. The solution we chose is a hybrid system which we found to be just as good as the flash system. We have another system that is flash-only and the hybrid appears to behave just as well. We accomplished that by just adding 20% or so SSDs and doing that gave us what we needed to achieve similar performance.

We have feeds into HP that give us the Infosight analysis. However, I'm not sure if we're doing it proactively.

The all-flash solution could be considered as positioning our organization for growth, but we also have a hybrid system which we find just as good as the flash. Either would position us for growth compared to previous solutions.

We have type of a private cloud-hosted solution in our data center. Nimble allows incredibly, fast data access for our SAN to our hypervisors and cluster. Nimble is just so good at what they do as far as the adaptive and hybrid flash stuff. We have two arrays: We have an adaptive and hybrid. 

We have a lot of healthcare clients. We have some who are in surgery at five in the morning. We are running these pretty heavy, intensive databases and SQL servers on the Nimble (or which are pulling off the Nimble). Having that type of server pinned to a specific volume, then having that volume accessible and prioritized over the other data which is on there, that is super helpful. This is why we like Nimble and what they do.

We want rock solid stability, making sure all of our customers have complete 100 percent uptime, which is our goal. Nimble achieves that pretty well.

InfoSight is a regular part of our weekly routine. We don't use it every single day, but we do check in on things every once in a while. Luckily, with Nimble, you can forget it and you don't really have to worry about it. However, if we do need to look into an issue, we definitely use InfoSight.

InfoSight has increased the availability of analytics and our ability to quickly get to them. We can migrate things faster. We can pull stuff out of production. We can restore from backups more quickly with the Nimble system than anything else.

We have had a couple of networking issues, temperature alarms, and a few things in our data center going on where InfoSight will scale back our utilization (or whatever) in order to keep us productive and up.

InfoSight has enabled us to get our servers back up faster, especially on the back-end. We have instant recovery. We are able to access that fast storage within seconds, which is very helpful. It enabled us to get service back up in a minute and a half.

The solution has improved our throughput tremendously. It has been on-demand access with 10 gig fiber. The disks, even though some of them are spinning discs, are rated, or in Nimble's little custom config in the way that it hits the cache first, then throws it off to the cold later. This is perfect, and it is great. It has improved everything.

The way that it optimizes the hot data versus cold data is really what Nimble does super well. 

I would like deduplication by default on all the volumes. I still don't understand (or know why) dedupe isn't enabled for the templates out-of-the-box. We have to go in and manually enable it each and every time. It might help to have a software revision for something like this, or even a more intuitive local dashboard, not InfoSight, but Nimble's local dash. That would be great.

The UI and local dash need improvement. They have changed it around a little bit between firmware upgrades. When you do that, things are out of place and not where they used to be. There is also some granular nitty-gritty analytics that we would like to get down into deeper, like when you view volumes, you have percent-free space, and the ability to sort those volumes by the percentage or sort by the amount of data: the megabytes, gigabytes, etc. That is no longer available in the new UI. I would love to see that improved, where you can sort down the list. 

While InfoSight is very useful, if you widen your scope of range when you're trying to look at a month of reports, the averaging that it does sort of skews things a bit. If you drill down further into a day or hour, it looks a lot better. I wish they would have a chart or GUI that didn't average as heavily, just giving you minute spikes and things that you could see on a wider view.

The stability is awesome. The product has always been reliable. It has been 100 percent up. We have never had any downtime with it. Even if a controller fails due to our firmware or whatever, it rolls over to the second one and keeps us running.

Outside of the outages which are beyond Nimble, such as power issues in the data center or heat. Nothing has been an issue with the Nimble product.

The scalability is awesome. We have the potential for multiple petabytes moving forward. While we don't take advantage of that right now, as we only have maybe 400 to 500 terabytes, the scalability (and the ability to add a shelf dynamically by just throwing it in there and adding it to the pool) is simple and easy. We already did this with our CS300, and it turned out real well.

Nimble's support is awesome and one of the best. You sort of get a Tier 3 plus guy every time that you call, no matter if it is a Tier 0 issue. This is super helpful in case we ever have problems.

The technical support never has anything that they can't solve for us. I have thrown everything at them that I could, and they are always on top of it.

We were running out of space. The ability to compress and dedupe stuff with Nimble is unmatched.

Coming off old Dell EMC PowerVaults and our own custom SAN solution that that we had running with storage, it has changed our entire ecosystem dramatically with the fast access times and the 10 gig fiber coming off of it. There is just nothing like it. The access times are less than two milliseconds. 

We keep our latency super low, even with 200 plus servers on it, which has really changed the ball game. Access to that data used to be a lot slower. Now, it's not, which is great.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I set up one last week, and you plug in your basic information for the array: The name and IPs, then you add it to your group, defining where you want it to point to. It's simple. It took me about 10 minutes to get everything up and rolling with the new HF.

We used a reseller, Flair Data Systems, out of Colorado Springs for our deployment. Flair has been awesome. They are partners for a lot of other things, as well as Nimble products.

We have seen tremendous ROI. It pays for itself 10 times over in the matter of four years.

The solution has increased our performance. We have about 20 times the IOPS that we use to, which was a huge selling point for us. We don't even use close to the amount that it is capable of handling, but it is certainly 20 times faster than what we had before.

We looked at Dell EMC, Nimbus, and Nimble.

Nimble just stuck out of the pack. The demo that they gave us years ago was really what sold it. We have a reseller who we work with, and we are a partner with them for other things. We do networks for them, and they do other system switching for us. The reseller had a Nimble and demonstrate it to us, which made the deal right there. It wasn't Nimble who did the demo, it was the reseller, and the reseller really came through.

Try it out. Demo it. Just have somebody put it in front of you, so you can poke around and demonstrate how it works with a real environment. Check out a Hyper-V or VMware. VMware is a lot more integrated with Nimble than Hyper-V. Live migrate your stuff. Move your stuff. Send backups to it. Send it over across the wire to a DR. Everything just works, and that is what we want.

It has been rock solid, 100 percent on time, and we have never had any issues with it.

We receive about a 2.4x compression rate, even on our old HPE CS300. With the new HF-Series, we will probably achieve a lot more than that because they have a lot of deduplication, etc. Unfortunately, we just deployed that last week. So, we are still in the trial process with it.

All-flash is coming down the pipeline. We don't have all-flash yet. We have all hybrid arrays. We are moving in that direction probably within the next two years or so.

We don't utilize any public cloud or HPE cloud stuff yet.

Biggest lesson learnt: Always go with a great vendor that has a great product.