HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We are using it for our high availability cluster.

It's very stable and fast, and I am very happy with the deduplication. It saves a lot of space, which is great.

We are doing a hybrid and are moving some machines to Microsoft Azure to run in hybrid mode. We are checking the availability of extra software-defined storage so that we can configure it.

We have been using this solution for four years.

It is a stable solution.

It is scalable, and we have 600 active users.

We have Lenovo SAN Storage, but it's very slow and is not recommended. The deduplication is not smooth as well. Nimble is the best solution.

The set up is very straightforward, and everything was smooth. Our cluster was managed, and we didn't have any issues.

We have never done any maintenance for the last four years, and even the power supply has been working fine. Everything has been in good condition for four years.

We don't require a license. If we used HPE InfoSight, then we would require a license, but for our needs, we don't need one.

If you want deduplication storage, HPE Nimble Storage is the solution for you, and if you want to run a unit for storage, then Nimble is the best. For deduplication, it is very nice because it dedupes every file you create. You will save storage space. I would give 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 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 have changed quite a bit in multiple areas. One area is simplicity in technology, in the following ways:

• The administrative overhead costs are less.
• It has reduced our cost per unit dramatically and that is very important.
• We are getting more performance, more agility and more space for the same cost. In fact, we are getting 3x-4x more than compared to the traditional NetApp and EMC products that we have used.

Basically, InfoSight has been tremendous, together with the support process; the way it proactively sends communication back to the support center, the proactive dispatch of parts, I think has been impressive. InfoSight and the support model really looks very rich in Nimble.

We are fairly happy with the product. I think most of it is definitely satisfying the requirements. But one area, for which we presented our feedback to Nimble, was how we can centralize, i.e., monitor the multiple arrays in a centralized manner, from a single viewer/ single console. Let's say, for example, you buy more and more form Nimble; how can you view all of them in a single console, i.e., viewing it in a single window-pane, such as viewing the health checks, etc. This they have taken up and I think they're going to get back to us, in a month's time or so, is to provide a solution.

The storage can be used in two modes, i.e., in a standalone mode or in clustered mode. In case you are using it in a clustered mode, they are integrated together logically and hence, it is possible. However, in case I'm using it in a standalone mode, they have more than one array, then instead of logging into every single array, how can I get a console from Nimble to view all of them in a single console, i.e. when they are configured in the standalone mode?

It's running perfectly fine and 100% available in the last 18 months.

It is definitely scalable. Of course, every unit has a limit, but it's scalable to 4, 5 or 6x, without touching the base. You can keep on adding the shelves.

The technical support is perfect; very, very good. I love the support forums.

We were using the NetApp solution beforehand. We switched because, one, obviously, we need to have simplicity in the solution; number two, the cost per unit should be attractive so that we can have good business models in place; obviously, the reliability and the interoperability with the product partners, like Cisco and the other compute and network platforms.

We had quite a few issues with other platforms, but Nimble has simplified it quite a bit and they have standardized quite a bit. It is providing results both operationally and commercially. It is very economical with much improved performance.

The setup was very straightforward, and the best part of Nimble is you don't need to have any more storage administrative policy, i.e., even the regular user, like the Windows administrator, can also manage the storage boxes. That's the beauty of Nimble.

It has got some advantages. It sells at a 60-70% lower price compared to NetApp, and EMC. On licensing, it's all bundled. You don't have to buy a separate license with anything. It all comes as one unit, and one bundle. You don't have to really worry about licensing. It comes with everything by default.

We did evaluate quite a few products. We evaluated Nimble vs Nutanix, Pure Storage and Tintri. We also tried exploring the hyperconverged solutions such as Nutanix and a few other products. But we felt that, for the service that we're providing, Nimble is the best choice because we have multiple options, i.e., both hybrid and flash options. It is easy to scale and switch between the platforms. Based on the performance requirements that we have, I think Nimble is the best choice, so we finalized on the product from among multiple other choices.

Go for it. It's definitely a good product from the current scheme of things and the current market trends. We are service providers; we do provide other service models to many customers and have a huge range of customers, so we do evaluate a lot of products, and we do evaluate a lot of softwares/services.

We found Nimble to be very interesting, and we are maintaining a good partnership with them. In fact, it's making good sense for the business models, and it's also meeting up with multiple use cases, i.e., VDI or non-persistent VDI, server workloads, database workloads, etc. Definitely, it is a good product and I would recommend it in the current scheme of things; it's the way to go.

InfoSight, for sure, has been the best feature so far.

I really would like to see synchronous replication. This is something that when we have multiple arrays in our environment and being able to do something like a zero RPO. Being a law firm, we really want our data to be protected all the time. Although, we are really rocking the Nimble snapshots and you'll hear them talk about the maximum snapshots that you can have; there's no performance impact and it's just really cool to have that kind of data protection. We're utilizing it but getting further, so as to get the knob all the way down to zero RPO, that would be a really cool feature. I hear that they're working on it.

It has been incredibly stable. It has been so stable that when I started with the Nimble acquisition/purchase process for us, I was the senior storage engineer. However, after implementing Nimble Storage, I did a little bit of the setup, wrote the APIs for us to be able to work with it and then, I had nothing to do. So at the end of the year, when we're supposed to do our employer reviews and self-evaluations, I wrote this whole thing about why you don't need me anymore. Just told them, "Look, congratulations. You no longer need a dedicated storage engineer. Do what you want with that." They said, "Sure. We're going to promote you to become the senior manager of the network and infrastructure team." It's kind of a cool story, it is true.

We've already added another shelf just because we saw another need coming up. It was just so simple, i.e., literally plug and play and very laid back.

I've not worked with HPE support, only with Nimble support, which is right now separate and hopefully, it will stay that way.

Every time that I've worked with Nimble, I've had an absolutely excellent experience. Whether it be the automated, "Hey, we have solved this and already closed this ticket for you"; those are invaluable, i.e., 85% of the tickets are being closed just from InfoSight.

I'll give you an example where I saw the support really step-up, which was when we set up our DR solution. We're actually using DR from their Nimble Storage but it's not under our control. There's a little bit of a conversation that needs to happen and for whatever reason, that conversation wasn't working perfectly and I opened a ticket with Nimble Storage. That was the last thing I did. From then on, the technician who was working and looking at the auto-sups that were coming in. He was working with the other guy saying, "Okay, this is exactly what you need to fix or modify on your side. Let's try it again." I'm checking my email and then they're like, "Okay, we got it." That was it. It was literally a zero-touch fix for me.

We were using a different company before. There are actually several reasons why we decided to look at other vendors. One of which was that we had an unexpected outage with our older storage system for about 56 hours and it was significant enough that even though, we usually were loyal to that company we said, "Maybe we should start talking to other people." We brought in Nimble Storage as well as about three or four other vendors and we did a little bit of bake-off. We had conversations with the teams, asked for references and really when we started asking to put some of our workloads onto their appliance, that's when it really made a difference for us.

They gave us so many options of what we wanted to do. What had happened was because of the company that they were replacing, was one of those big iron-type companies, so they really wanted to just have a picture with their appliance next to ours. Nimble Storage came out and they racked everything for me; they plugged it in, they did all the setup and said, "Here it is. Here's your password. Go ahead and start carving out some volumes." Within probably an hour, I already had my first volumes already mapped and masked to the posts, all ready to go.

We do actually have a certain set of criteria that we use and it's a weighted criteria set. One of the top criteria, for us, is the relationship that you have with the vendor because everybody hopes that things are going to go right, but the real question is when things don't go right, is your team going to stand beside you? I have worked with the sales team and have said, "Hey guys! Is this pillow talk or is this an after-the-sale conversation? Are you still going to stand by me?" This is me, the customer, talking to the vendor.

They stood by me, more than did prior to the purchase. I get constant updates from them checking in, "Hey, do you want to talk about whatever?" I always feel well-prepared. We never had an incident where I really had to hit that red button, but I am 100% confident that if I did, then they would be standing there right probably in the room with me, making sure that I've got everything I need to get through this situation. This is a huge thing, i.e., being right there for us, which is reliability from an array perspective. It has got to have at least 5 nine's and that's just starting the conversation. We absolutely need the critical uptime and from there, there's also the price-point. For us, it's the vendor relationship, product reliability, and then, probably, the price-point while selecting a vendor.

The vCenter integration is very good. I can not only see what each of my iSCSI presentations look like from a performance standpoint, I can see the snapshots, I can shrink, grow, modify, or delete them as well. In addition to that, InfoSight is a great tool to look at the "big picture" when planning what you want to do next with your Nimble Storage.

The visibility and power of the vCenter integration allows me to troubleshoot, diagnose and rectify most issues before anyone notices. I can also deploy new virtual machines much more quickly because I don’t have to bounce between different tools to do it.

Honestly, the only thing that could really get better is the price. Although, the price on these units isn’t too bad at all.

I've used it for 11 months.

There have been no stability issues on our Nimble Storage arrays thus far (we have five of them). Nimble is VERY specific about testing to the extent that if a release of the software has a known major bug, they won’t release it for your array (or at least they haven’t so far).

Each one of our arrays can connect to four storage shelves. That gives us the possibility of around 240TB per array with the h90T storage shelves. In addition to that, you can federate Nimble Storage arrays as well.

Customer service most certainly gets a 10/10. Not only do they resolve my issues when I call them in, but with InfoSight they also watch my storage for me and alert me to potential issues that may be upcoming. An example would be the one time I had a bad power supply, and they had one on the way to me before I called it in.

Technical support also gets 10/10. See above.

We used HP EVA Fiber Channel SANS before. The HP EVA SANS were starting to show their age and were very expensive to run and maintain. In addition to that, they didn’t perform as well as the current day machines.

It was straightforward looking back. At the time it seemed difficult, but it was almost all networking and VMware work. It seemed difficult because we weren’t used to iSCSI. It’s really not that much different from Fiber Channel when you really look at it.

When we deployed this we were totally new to an iSCSI environment. We actually called in some professional services. They did such a good job, I’m relatively confident that I could deploy a Nimble Storage array on my own.

We implemented our first array with a Nimble engineer onsite. Our second array was done via a vendor. Both experiences were excellent.

We couldn’t be happier with our ROI on this product. It has made managing both storage and VMware simpler and more efficient.

The tendency when spending the kind of money you have to spend on storage is to get the minimum you need. I’d suggest that you think in terms of purchasing something you can grow into instead. We made the decision to purchase CS240 units. If I had it to do over I would have purchased a 400 (which today would be a CS500).

We looked at

• EMC
• HP Lefthand
• HP 3PAR
• NetApp

Nimble Storage array is a good buy no matter which way you slice it. I’m thinking it fits into anything but the large enterprise arena and they are making progress on that with some of their offerings.

Secondary storage and supplemental primary storage are our use cases. We use Nimble for business-critical applications such as accounting, our in-house EPS platforms.

The InfoSight platform and the reporting help us to identify network issues and compatibility problems.

All-flash also positions our company for growth. We've deployed 3PAR all-flash for our core applications and will not transition outside of flash from this point forward.

Nimble has increased performance with better IOPS evaluation, mixed-load capacity. Also, it improves throughput which means we've been able to transition off of remaining rack mounts onto Nimble plus virtualization structure, in a cost-effective manner.

• Reliability
• Performance
• Cost

The solution's uptime is fantastic. It's 100 percent. In addition, Nimble's storage capacity efficiency is very effective.

I'm very impressed with the stability of the solution.

We haven't had to scale beyond our initial purchase.

We have used tech support. Nimble's technical support is excellent.

We previously used Dell EMC. We went to Nimble because of space-growth requirements.

The initial setup was straightforward. The platform is fairly intuitive with standardized SCSI configuration and it was up and running. The product was very self-explanatory so we were able to move it into production very fast.

We had install assistance from HPE, but they would probably not be required for further installs. Our experience with HPE's assistance was good.

We've seen ROI in the retirement of obsolete platforms, the reduction of the licensing cost of outside products, and by collapsing of other storage platforms into a single platform.

We looked at 3PAR, Tintri, Pure, and more. We chose Nimble because it was an HPE acquisition and due to familiarity with Nimble products.

My advice is that you bring it onsite and evaluate InfoSight's reporting.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using Nimble is that it provides better insight with a single pane of glass.

It's feature-complete for what we are looking for. I rate it a ten out of ten. We've been very happy with Nimble.

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.