HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

I feel most IT consultants, traditionally, would consider Nimble a mid-line or a starter-line, but I feel that they operate in an enterprise-class. I believe that especially their All Flash Arrays that came out, that was their new adaptation from their hybrid. We use an AF5000 in our environment, and we're getting almost 20-to-one performance compared to what we had with our traditional legacy stack, the EMC VMAX 10K.

I think HPE is headed in the right direction. From what I know, their management is actually putting Nimble on the forefront to be the leader, and I think that's where it belongs. To stay ahead of the game, they need to put Nimble in front and stay there, and ride that horse throughout.

It is stable for us, from a hardware standpoint.

We have been fortunate enough to deal with still with the Nimble engineers and not had to transfer over to HPE. Now if you were to ask me about the HPE support on the SimpliVity stack, I would have to say "failure to deliver."

It was actually one of the bleeding edge technologies we reviewed over the legacy stack that we were dealing with traditionally. We used EMC in the past from a spindle and, at that point, we didn't feel EMC was adequate to fulfill our needs. So we looked at Nimble from price and technology points of view and it met everything, all of our reviews and all of our requirements.

The setup was very, very simple. When we got our AF5000, no kidding, we had it up in production within two hours. If we were to take the similar setup, with the EMC VMAX, it took us over three months. Big difference.

The return on investment for us has been a tremendous asset. Before, we were on the legacy stack with the EMC and we just weren't getting our nightly batch jobs done on time, and that was having to run throughout the day. With Nimble, we have actually reduced that window from 12 hours to six hours, so we got a 50 percent return on investment, right off the bat.

I am actually here, at the HPE Discover 2018 conference, to find out what they plan on doing with Nimble in the future. We're also a user of the SimpliVity stack and I didn't feel that the roadmap for that has played out. We're here to see how the Nimble is going to play out. I'm very interested because we're coming up on a refresh cycle and we want to know whether we want to go down that path or not.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. I'm not being biased by any means. It checks all the boxes for us.

It is storage for our VMware vSphere servers. It is also a destination for some Commvault backups and replications. We use it for a number of things.

It has been three years, and the performance has been great. We have bought eight more since buying the first one.

In our organization, when people say "I need a new server," I say, "I have the space."

• Zero downtime
• Very easy installation
• Easy upgrades

My version does not have dedupe, it has compression. I know that they have dedupe now. I just need to buy it. 

I would like to see native network attached storage (NAS) functionality. Our customers are looking for NAS, and Nimble can't give it to them.

I have added expansion shelves on several of them. It is simple to do. You plug it in, you attach two cables, then you press one button, like "Add", and that is all you have to do, which is wonderful.

Technical support is very good. When I call, I get a top-tier guy right away. I do not call very often, but if I have a question, such as, how to tear apart this array and add it to this one over here, they tell me right away. It is great.

One of the sales guys was aggressive and he met with me several times. We were, frankly, very impressed and very surprised. He said, "How about if you try it out?" and I said, "Yes." It was try-before-you-buy, and it worked.

Previously, we had some HPE P4500 LeftHand network devices which were getting old. We switched because needed a hardware refresh and more capacity.

The setup was approximately an hour-long process, almost like a one-button process. It was just so easy. Compared to most things that I have ever installed, it was simple and amazingly easy.

The first two that I bought were incredibly expensive, compared to the last five to seven that I have bought. The price has come way down, and it has been a year or so since we bought one.

We thought about the HPE 3PAR, but it seemed to be pricey. Frankly, Nimble came in and sold us on their solution. The 3PAR guy did not really make a strong sales presentation. He just said, "Trust me, it's good." My reaction was, we can't just trust you. Whereas, the Nimble guy told us the ins and outs of it and gave us all the details.

Try it out. You will love InfoSight, their online viewing tool, it is a wonderful addition. HPE thought so too, so they bought it and are putting it in everywhere. It is great, no downtime, with no care and feeding from my point of view. It just works.

It has surpassed all of our needs, it has been great. I need to buy more now, I am almost out of capacity. I would give it an unqualified 10 out of 10.

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.

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.

They could probably improve an organization with just about anything. It is all a matter of ease of use, ease of the implementation, etc. From that perspective, I would like to think it has been able to accomplish what people want done in an easier way, so they can get other stuff done.

• The all-flash arrays, today people really want them. 
• Their hybrid stuff is great. 
• They do a good job of helping people do storage in a very simple way.

There are customers who want to do some different things with the Microsoft Resilient File System. There are some customers who want to do different types of connectivity. I do not know if I would call that an improvement, necessarily, because if you want that, you should get a different product.

We have not had any issues whatsoever from our customer base. 

I have heard of one customer who had a catastrophic failure. I do not know if it was caused by the product or something they did. From our perspective, the product is very stable.

It fits everywhere. It just depends on what the customer is trying to accomplish. If you are somebody who needs 30 petabytes of storage at rest, it is probably not the right thing to do. If you are somebody who is trying to grow a virtualization implementation of some sort, and you just need storage which keeps growing, that is where it should go. We have used this product in all of those environments, and we have also used different products at the really big end.

They did something very well that most people fail at, they created raving fans! The way they did that was by creating a good product, but more importantly, they created a tech support who supports more than just their product. If you called in and you had VMware trouble, most people would say, "That is a VMware problem," but they would get a guy on the phone who knew what was going on with VMware and help you. 

That was the number one thing which made us approve of it. After that, it was just their innovation; their continuing to just keep up with everything. 

Since they were acquired by HPE, I cannot speak too much about the technical support. They did have everything down better than anybody else. That was what drew us to them.

If you are a super small company, the product is probably not right for you. It is out of your price range. Anything from mid-SMB up to enterprise, it is absolutely the right product.

I am giving it a 10 out of 10 because I can't think of a reason why I would not. The product is good and always has been.

1. CASL makes use of hybrid disks to retrieve frequently used data from a set of flash drives while storing actual data to high capacity SAS drives.
2. Zero Copy Clone saves storage space by updating only changed blocks to the cloned copy.
3. In-line Compression reduces the amount of space taken up by data without impacting performance.
4. Very Efficient Replication – Only replicates changed blocks which eliminates the need for expensive compression/dedup devices such as Riverbed.
5. Instantaneous snapshots provides a backup dataset of an entire server or the volume that can be restored or used to retrieve data or clone another server
6. Encryption – Ability to encrypt the entire SAN or selected volumes to protect data at rest which meets many government requirements and security requirements.
7. Easy setup, GUI interface and command line tools to administer the SAN.
8. InfoSight provides access to call history, historical performance, updates, performance metrics for virtual environment, KB articles, Nimble community, all for free – very valuable site.
9. Excellent Support Technicians – support techs are very knowledgeable and provides quick and efficient solution. They not only know Nimble SAN but are also very knowledgeable about virtual environments/technologies, switches, fiber, databases, applications and other networking devices that are involved in making a cloud technology.
10. Full redundancy makes all the parts hot swappable and expandable.
11. Grouping SANS and moving volumes between the SAN while the data is in active use on the servers – without any downtime.
12. No licensing for individual features – everything is included.

We have a small datacenter with Nimble Storage SANs that replicates to Nimble Storage SAN at our remote Disaster Recovery location. We are able to replicate every two hours and some of the tests we have done shows very good data integrity upon recovery at the DR location. Along with virtual servers and Nimble Storage, DR is much easier now.

Over a year ago, Nimble was available with either iSCSI connectivity or Fiber. Controllers can be upgraded or replaced with either of the connectivity interfaces. But, a combination of iSCSI and Fiber unit will provide flexibility in connecting SAN with existing network switches or fiber switches which can reduce overall cost and help with connecting high IO devices to the fiber interface.

Not at all. It’s been up and running ever since. We have had a few hard drive failures. Support actually calls us to let us know that there is a problem and a replacement part is on the way. It arrives in less than 4 hours. If we unplug a wire or perform maintenance on switches, Nimble support gets all the alerts and they proactively contacts us to see if there are any issues. We also receive a call from our Service Engineer to check on the health of the device and whenever there are any updates to the software.

We have expanded cache on one of the SAN which was very easy to do without any downtime.

9.9999 on a scale of 1-10 (1=worst, 10=best).

We had and EMC SAN in the past which took up a lot of space and required regular maintenance from a service technician including several downtimes.

Initial setup can be done using a Nimble setup client or via the console in about 5 easy steps.

If you are looking for a scalable, easy, performance, expandable SAN which provides all the great features without charging you licensing fees for all these useful features, go with Nimble Storage.

Yes, EMC, NetApp, Simplivity and Violin.

You will be up and running in an hour. Very easy steps to setup and five clicks to setup volumes, replication, etc.

The performance and simplicity are the most valuable features. We originally moved from NetApp, which in our opinion was an extremely complicated system to learn. It was not intuitive at all, whereas everything about Nimble Storage is intuitive, hence their name. All their online documentation is easy to read and easy to follow. All their online sales information is transparent and usually done by a third party instead of by themselves. As far as the performance, they're able to get much better performance with normal spinning disks. We've always had spinning disks in our storage solutions, but they're able to get better performance out of the typical spinning disk, just by the way they've written their software on the back-end. Then for solid-state drives, they can get better performance through read operations through the data.

One of the reasons why we had to move away from our old storage solutions was that we started to use virtual workstations. That's a solution that we wanted to move forward and we just didn't have the performance to do that with our NetApp solution. That has definitely transformed our business as far as being able to centralize all our workstations into one solution. We can also better leverage disaster recovery, because all our workstations will replicate over to our disaster recovery location.

They only use block-level storage and with NetApp, we were able to use file-level storage. That means we could leverage NFS or we could leverage SIFS and we could actually host a file server on the storage solution itself. We could do that with our NetApp solution. Right now, they only use block-level solutions, so you can only use iSCSI.

I have used this solution for almost two and half years.

I have not had stability issues with Nimble Storage.

We haven't had to scale out yet, but we would have zero issues if we needed to. They have plenty of offerings for us to do that.

I'd give technical support 5/5. When I call, I get somebody on the phone immediately. I just have to press one number to go to technical support and I immediately have somebody on the phone.

Setup was very straightforward. That was one of the things we liked about it most.

I recommend the product because of the licensing and pricing. It seems like they are flexible regarding pricing in compared to other vendors. There is really is no licensing; it's all in one. It all comes in one bundle.

We evaluated NetApp, which is our previous solution, and then we also evaluated Pure Storage.

My advice would be to use it. Just make sure whether you need to go with an all solid-state drive solution or whether you can use their hybrid solution, because there's going to be a big price difference.

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.