HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

The primary use case is to monitor my storage.

We are in radiology. Although most of our radiologists just read x-rays, there are moments when it is STAT read, where they have to read things ASAP. This applies to the emergency room and emergency departments. Sometimes, things need to be read, and it is a matter of life or death. This can also apply to cancers, detections, etc. Therefore, we need to make sure the storage stays up, and it is working. Then, our radiologists can do their job.

For us, it is about speed and stability. There are a lot of redundancies in place. I am able to access what I need to access. 

Our situation is sort of unique. We need fast disk for compute, but then we also need more traditional disk for our images. Having Nimble, where I can have both fast and traditional disk in one pane, and still see everything, is pretty awesome. 

We use InfoSight for predictive analysis because the answer to most of our problems is that, "It isn't our problem." However, we are being blamed for it. Thus, I can get my answers improved by using InfoSight that it isn't us causing the problem by going into it. For example, one of our applications was acting weird, and we had the application vendor on. They really couldn't answer much. As one of my troubleshoot methods, I said, "Let me check InfoSight." I logged in, and I could see a VM that was heavily pegged and almost in a critical-like status. That VM was the reason why the issue was the way it was. Now, It wasn't because of our infrastructure set up, it still was an application issue, but I was able to pinpoint exactly what it was based off of that.

That application with problems had about 30 servers. As I'm not an application vendor, I don't know which servers serve what purpose within the application. I was able to go into InfoSight, and it told me that one in particular needed to be worked on, so I didn't have to waste time looking at the other 29 servers. Therefore, I knew that one was the one that we work on, and that is the one that needs to be fixed.

We use a platform as a service and have multiple application vendors who comprise that platform. There are moments when those application vendors put the blame on us. By working in InfoSight, I am able to say, "No, it is not us." I can actually provide proof, either by using screenshots or through reporting. 

I wish they would put the InfoSight page back the way it was. I got in it for the first time about two years ago, and it looked the same for about a year and a half. Then, about six months ago, it changed. There are different options now. I can still get to where I need to go, but it feels like it takes longer, where before it didn't. Also, I felt like I had a lot more options before. I have to do a lot more to digging now to get to where I need to go. I just wish they had their old page back.

There are a lot of redundancies in all the right areas, so it is pretty stable.

I get alerts, email, and texts that I regularly check a couple of times a day.

I check the solution's storage capacity a couple times a day. One of the tasks in the morning is someone on my team will go in and take a screenshot of exactly what our capacity is at the moment. Then, we are able to do trend analysis and some forecasting of when we think our capacity is going to be close to maximum or not.

I have already already grown it and added an extra array earlier last year. I still have room for more. So, the scalability is pretty good.

This solution is not for growth, but it can grow. We have the capability to grow, but we're not there yet.

I rarely call the technical support, but when I do, they are good.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is a lot of plug and play. Although, there was a diagram of instructions, which was maybe one sheet long. So, it was easy. A lot of that stuff was already ready for me.

When I scaled up, the system came to me, and I did it myself.

We do use a reseller, Logicalis.

We are still too new with our product to know what the ROI is.

The solution has improved our throughput.

We looked at other storage companies. The fact that I can incorporate both flash and spin into one pane, look at Nimble and still get solutions. For me, it was a no-brainer.

This was the discovery phase. We vetted out quite a few storage arrays. This one was the one that we all came in agreement with.

We looked at Hitachi and Pure Storage. The reason why Pure Storage was removed from our list was because they only offered flash. We needed both flash and spin. 

At my previous place of employment, I mentioned to my previous boss about this solution because it would have been good at my prior place of employment. They were in a similar situation. They had flash, spinning disks, etc. However, they used Pure Storage, Hitachi, and even some Dell EMC. When you have so many different arrays, or so many different companies, that you have to work with, it is very easy when there is a problem for a vendor to point their finger at another vendor. For a better chance of a successful integration, keep the products (and vendors) down to a minimum.

I don't really have to do a whole lot to it. Plug it in, and it does its job successfully.

The performance was already good. This isn't a reactionary, but being proactive. We are doing these measures to ensure that we don't have an issue.

The biggest lesson learned is to keep using Nimble.

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.

Our primary use case if for our central data storage. This contains our files, financial services, and customer data.

We are a 24/7 operation, even though our corporate office is a typical Monday through Friday operation. It is vital that we have all of our data up and running, all of the time because a lot of our customers have what they call "volume runs" during the month. For example, one of our customers is subscription-based, so we have to run about three million packages during a two-week timeframe. All of the data has to be fully accessible and we can't afford to have any downtime.

This solution has increased our performance by ten to fifteen percent. From both an operational standpoint and management perspective, it is an improvement. It has also reduced costs and allowed us to allocate more towards other projects.

My engineers have said that this solution has improved our throughput. This has helped because when a customer comes up asked for a solution then we can guarantee it will actually meet the demand for their product or service.

The All-Flash storage positions us for growth because of the speed aspect. We have pool data that doesn’t have to be accessed quickly, but when it comes to other things then we are required to be on the spot. This is especially true for SQL databases.

The most valuable features of this solution are it's reliability and the redundancy that it provides. This is also a good product from a financial perspective.

The performance of this solution allows us to have real-time access for SQL databases.

I would like to see more advanced analytics in the next release of this solution. Perhaps it will help us to see things that we're not seeing already.

We have almost one hundred percent uptime. It seems very reliable and cost-effective, and it seems like it can be molded to any solution that you need.

From what I have heard, it is extremely scalable. It is interesting because you can start with a very small margin and expand to as high as you want, with very little effort on the side of the end-user.

Technical support for this solution is very good. It's always on-demand, and we never feel like we're too far off from getting support. It's always available when we need it, and you're getting a live person a lot faster than you would from other providers.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup of this solution was a lot more straightforward than we thought it was going to be.

We handled the deployment in-house.

The ROI from this solution comes from the savings in time, just from managing and keeping everything up and running. It also reduces the stress and burden on our database team.

We looked at providers other than HP, such as Pure Storage, but we don't like to be on the bleeding edge. We prefer to be with providers that have been stable and around for a long period of time.

This solution is efficient in more than one way. Not only is it high performing, but it is also more compact and fits better in our storage arrays than equipment from other storage providers. This helps out with space in the data center.

We have experienced an increase in performance of ten to fifteen percent.

This product has proven itself to be very reliable and we're looking forward to where it's going to take us in the future. Everything that they've told us it's going to do, it has done and exceeded.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is not to run at any solution that is already out there. Really dive into what it is that you need. Find out what your baseline is, and have a number in mind from a cost perspective. Then take a look at what your priorities are. Is it cost, or uptime, or perhaps having a reliable solution? Always define what your parameters are.

My advice to anybody considering a solution such as this is to always do your research. Look at everything, including peer evaluations, and always take your time. I have met a lot of people that try to rush into a solution and then end up finding stuff that they didn't think they needed. So, as much as possible, take your time and do your studies.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Nimble to virtualize all of our applications. For the hypervisor we use VMware. We use Nimble for the storage platform for the hypervisor.

It's been performing amazingly. 

Our organization functions very similarly to how it had operated prior to Nimble, but our applications are more responsive. The time it takes to produce some reports - specifically our year-end accounting reports which, sometimes, could take a half a day to produce - now, with Nimble on the backside, with the high I/O that it has, we're finding that we're reducing the time to process these reports by up to 70 to 80 percent. It's a significant improvement.

InfoSight provides real-time reporting, it gives you information about your different volumes, how the arrays are being used, I/O, performance in general. That's where we find value in it as well.

What I have seen so far has been sufficient for our needs.

Scalability is another reason we chose to go with Nimble: upgrading to another storage array. If we need higher capacity or throughput, we can just replace controllers, we don't have to replace or forklift-upgrade the whole chassis.

I've used their technical support once. They contacted me, proactively. It was a positive experience. We were there doing some regular maintenance and accidentally pulled a 10-gig module and, while we were swapping it, and thought we had done it right, the array went offline for about 20 or 30 seconds. They let us know that there was something wrong pretty quickly. That was pretty awesome.

We were previously a Dell EqualLogic shop for some 15 years. In fact, we still have them in production. Since the acquisition of EqualLogic by Dell, the product doesn't seem to be increasing in technology as we would have hoped, as had happened previously. I had always had my eye on Nimble anyway and was waiting for the right opportunity. That opportunity came, and I already knew what I wanted. I jumped ship and we're going full speed ahead with Nimble.

We're transitioning everything over to Nimble because of the high performance we get out of it and the ease of use. From a supportability standpoint, it's a lot simpler. The Nimble people seem to detect when things have problems before we report that there's an issue.

We needed a vendor that would come in at a similar price point, which they did. But we needed to have a better way of doing disaster recovery. That was probably the primary objective, how we would handle that going forward. The way we did Snapshotting, the old Dell EqualLogic way, was somewhat bloated, took up a lot of space and required a lot of free array space. With Nimble, a lot of those limitations didn't exist. Also, obviously, compatibility with hypervisors was important, and Nimble is compatible with all of them.

We absolutely already see a return on investment. There's definitely value in it. Not only from the increase in productivity for the users using the applications that Nimble is hosting, but from an IT standpoint, expanding the volumes, regular maintenance, adding, it's just very simple to use.

We have only had it a short period of time, so it's hard to tell if it has affected our IT operation expenses yet. Maybe it has a little bit.

We did consider other vendors. Ultimately, I had had my eye on Nimble for a long time, and I had already researched it, had done my homework on it, and was just waiting for the right opportunity.

From a virtualized infrastructure standpoint, I would advise that, if you are looking for a high-performing storage array - not necessarily long-term storage because the price per gig is pretty expensive on an all-flash array. But, application performance, database performance, if you're running Exchange environments, SQL environments, If you're doing that type of stuff, then Nimble is a good match for that type of workload.

I would definitely and easily rate Nimble a 10 out of 10.

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.

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.

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.

We use Nimble for our virtualized workloads.

We have been using it close to three years. Therefore, it was even before the HPE acquisition of Nimble that we started using it.

It has been performing well so far. Initially, we purchased Nimble for low-end or less critical workloads, and it has started to evolve. Now, it is right up there with our Tier-Two storage for CO3 and CO4 level workloads.

We have lost that dependency with traditional data center architecture where you have your storage team and server team. Now, our virtual admins are able to take control of Nimble and know how to allocate the storage, whenever it is required, thus reducing time.

The most valuable feature is InfoSight, and the ability that InfoSight gives you, from insight within your environment to what is going on at the storage layer. Also, since we use this product integrated with VMware, we are able to have a view of our virtual infrastructure segregated up to the VM level. We are able to see where the most IOPS are located, etc. Therefore, we are able to prevent and predict where things are going well or badly.

The solution that I have is a hybrid, not a full flash. The hybrid version could be improved.

Stability has not been an issue at all. We have not had a major issue nor downtime which has occurred with Nimble. Whenever we have code updates, you have high availability between your controllers, which is good.

With scalability, we had to replace one of our controllers to upgrade CPU in cache. In the case of something like this, as long as the team is able to manage it within a scheduled downtime window, it is pretty simple.

Technical support is good. We recently use them. There was a bug on the latest firmware release. So, we had to call and see what was going on. There were some features that were enabled recently that were affecting read IOPS or how the way read IOPS are managed. It was simple fix. They just gave us what we needed to do and what we needed to change, then we applied the changes.

We were looking for something where the cost would not be as high as what we were used to with traditional storage arrays. Even so, it has been on par in terms of performance, even though the price was lower, with what we had with other arrays.

The initial setup was straightforward. The initial setup took a little bit over a week because we were in the learning phase. 

We have other arrays, like VNX or HDS from Hitachi. Complexity-wise, this product (Nimble) is simpler and nimbler to set up.

We recently implemented smaller Nimble boxes or arrays for an isolated environment, which was set up by me, within one or two days.

We have not quantified it. However, with the capabilities on compression, we have seen a lot of VMs running because probably 80 to 95 percent of the data is the same. Therefore, we are able to get a good compression ratio. Because of this, I think we have saved a lot compared to a traditional storage array.

We had also shortlisted EMC. We initially went with Nimble because of price, but later figured out the other benefits.

It is a good investment, especially on virtualized workloads. We have seen a lot of benefit there. We have not used it for other types of virtual workloads, both mixed workload applications and databases.