HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

For Nimble, valuable for us is the hybrid solution that they have on flash and spindle disk. So we are able to put very flexible loads on our private clouds in Nimble.

Well it was simple for us to implement this technology. At some point, for the duration of the storage, we were using EMC basically. And also, the analytics piece that Nimbo has is very convenient because you have a lot of information in real time on how the CPU is behaving, on storage and different stuff.

Actually they already have a solution for all flash. So, we are planning to use that in our deployment. So, actually there were no issues with features, and we are waiting for the upgrade.

We have been running with this solution for two years.

We haven't had any issues so far with the stability. It is really stable.

Scalability is a little bit limited. I mean, they have different models and you need to make some upgrades in CPUs or storage. It gets easier at some point but we reach some limits and we need to make an upgrade right away.

The support is very good.

The setup was very straightforward.

Whenever we want some more capacity, CPU, memory, storage etc, then we normally make an analysis and basically we make the upgrades.

We have Nimble and Tripper, as part of the approved solutions. We have Tintri and Dell Compellent.

We have been working with HP on the server side for a long time and I think that now that they have Nimble and Tripper, they have very good and complete solutions. So we trust them. And they have good solutions because depending on the type of load that you are trying to put together, I mean, you can choose either one of these systems.

There were multiple things which helped our choice, but in this particular case, it was EMC because the EMC solution was not using the same technology so we were not seeing the benefits of having this on the analytics especially.

Well its price is very important but also the support. It has a global presence. We are in 35 countries. So, whenever we choose a solution or a standard, we need to define that very clearly. Response time and the technology itself.

I mean go for it. It's a good solution. It's a right mix between costs and return on investment. Definitely upgrade.

Performance, snapshot and replication capability. It’s also nice that they continue to add features at no cost through software updates. Their online portal InfoSight is helpful for tracking assets, health, utilization and other metrics.

Performance – our arrays can handle varying workloads effectively. Snapshot and replication capability – have allowed us to simplify and improve our backup and recovery capabilities. Their online portal InfoSight is helpful for tracking assets, health, utilization and other metrics. It’s also nice that they continue to add features at no cost through software updates.

We shifted from tape based backups to snapshot and replication based backups. That improved backup performance, restore time, reliability and reduced manual effort on managing the backups.

It would be good to have a built in way to index snapshots so that we’d be able to granularly see what files were in a snapshot and restore at a file level. We’re using an add on product from Commvault to achieve this.

4 years.

No.

No. The solutions are very scalable. There are multiple ways to upgrade and scale – adding storage shelves, upgrading flash, upgrading processing etc.

Excellent. Proactive alerting. Responsive phone support unlike many other companies. Our local field rep is always willing to help.

Many different SANs.

Quick to set up and configure.

Reasonable pricing compared to other SAN vendors.

EMC, IBM, NetApp.

Give it a try with a POC. This is one of the rare vendors that do what they say they will. Their sales team is very easy to work with.

We have a primary data center, and then a secondary data center for our applications and our colo (colocation data center). Our financial and document management systems are on this platform.

This solution has given us reliability that is evident by the fact that it has been running for five years with virtually no hiccups.

InfoSight automatically predicted or resolved problems in your environment. It has given us insights with respect to our VM using more resources than we thought.

Our performance has increased by approximately ten to fifteen percent.

The most valuable features of this solution are the replication functionality and the snapshotting of the storage array.

InfoSight has been very useful because it gives me the ability to see what ones are actually working and how they’re functioning.

We use this for business-critical applications. Our financial and documentation management systems are on this platform.

An area that needs improvement is extending the life of the device after five years.

The solution is very good with respect to stability. The uptime is very good.

The scalability of this solution is moderate. 

Storage capacity efficiency is very fitting for our company and our usage.

Technical support for this solution is good.

We implemented this solution because our legacy applications needed a better solution than we already had. We used to use the HP LeftHand Storage Array. Our performance has increased by approximately ten to fifteen percent.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We deployed this solution ourselves.

We have seen ROI, but I do not have specific data points.

Our options were IBM and HP, and we found that HP was the better choice for us.

Using this solution has shown us some of the things that are possible, and what we can better improve on in the future.

Nimble Storage is a solution that I would recommend to anybody who is in the same kind of space as I am.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is production storage. We run ERP applications, as an example, of our business-critical applications.

There has been no downtime, which is probably the best thing.

We use InfoSight predictive analytics. It helps us from a performance perspective by identifying potential bottlenecks.

InfoSight has identified controller failures or performance issues.

Performance and support are its most valuable features.

The uptime has been solid.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is good. We bought it in such a way that we could add disk to it, so we provided foresight into our purchase anyway.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is good. The new solution is doing deduplication now, as well as compression. The old solutions could only do compression, so it has been good that way.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. Our last solution did not.

The technical support is excellent. My team is extremely happy with Nimble Support and InfoSight.

We had performance issue on our previous solution (AF3000).

The initial setup was straightforward because we have a rep who we have dealt with for six to seven years.

We used a reseller, CDW, for the deployment. Our experience with CDW was good, but it was our Nimble HPE rep who really did the work.

The solution has doubled our performance, which is why we upgraded.

The solution has improved our throughput, keeping applications responsive.

It is a CAPEX investment. Over the anticipated lifespan, I would say the pricing is $10,000 a month.

The price has room for improvement.

Pure Storage and Nimble were on our shortlist. 

We chose Nimble because they were the incumbent. We had a good experience with them. They have good support. Ultimately, they had the better price.

We receive great support. We have had no unplanned downtime.

Our experience with the product has been excellent.

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 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.

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.

• Support
• Pricing
• Technical engineers
• Units are nice because its only one box, while, for example, ExtremIO was six units
• Setup was very easy because the software was user-friendly

• We now have a smaller footprint.
• I'm surprised at how fast the hybrid is.
• The whole technical staff expertise is very strong.
• It's resilient - you're only supposed to pull out two drives at a time, but we pulled four simultaneously and it still survived.

Currently there's no deduplication, and I would like to see that. Also, it's still slower than flash storage.

The VDI is supposed to be smooth, but we still saw a little delay in typing and performing general work even though we didn’t put much load into it.

The controls are built into the unit, and I wouldn’t hesitate to scale it.

The tech support is great. Within a few minutes of pulling drives, someone calls or emails right away to check up.

It was very simple and fast. It only took three hours, including racking, to set everything up.

All the features are included in Nimble, so there's no need to pay for features later on.

We were looking for a VDI solution that gave the same performance as a desktop/laptop. We tested PureStorage and ExtremIO, but chose to do a PoC with Nimble because others who were already using it were so positive about it.

If you're not using it for VDI, it's also good for general storage.