HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

Nimble Storage is our primary production storage vendor.  We use this with VMware on a daily basis including a new AFA5000 all-flash array for our DMS system.

These arrays perform very well and have allowed us to move many physical servers to virtual and run them from the Nimble arrays without any performance impact and there is actual performance improvement.

The most valuable features are -

1. Ease of setup

2. Ease of Management with Web UI

3. InfoSight - analytics sight that collects data for all Nimble arrays deployed

InfoSight has been very valuable in determining upgrade requirements, bottlenecks, etc. The latest update to the site now allows Per-VM monitoring within the Virtual Infrastructure now too.

No areas require improvement at this time. The arrays run very well and updates are flawless when completed.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

We have had some stability issues with one array which has happened twice during subsequent software updates but is due to a bad Postgres database. Nimble has been very helpful and are even replacing the array with a brand new one for our troubles.

There are no scalability issues and the arrays can be upgraded with ease.

Customer Service:

Customer service has been top notch with Nimble and would be 10/10. They even worked with use to replace a faulty array.

Technical Support:

Technical Support is one of the best and is 10/10. The autosupport system they have in place that creates tickets for you automatically is great. You can even specify on the InfoSight webpage which ones you want to Auto-Close, etc.

Positive

Previously used Dell EqualLogic arrays but they were end of life.

The initial setup is straightforward. You connect the array to the network and power it up. You then run the Nimble Setup Manager which will detect the array on the network and allow you to complete an initial configuration. Once that is done you can then use the Web UI to finalize the configuration.

It was completed in-house with the assistance from Nimble when required.

Nimble has allowed us to run without much down time giving us a great ROI on our investment.

No other options for storage were evaluated.

Given the chance to evaluate Nimble it is highly recommended. Their CASL architecture is very fast and being able to get the performance from the spinning disk that you see on some flash arrays is great. They are always improving the product and software including the recent changes to the InfoSight web page that allows Per-VM monitoring now. There is also excellent support and customer service when you need it.

Firstly, we get pretty good support from HPE on it, in terms of leads. So that's valuable by definition.

The quality of the service and management tools let us do things like contractual guarantees for storage performance for customers. That's something we couldn't do before.

It's a fairly simple-to-manage platform. We had a situation in the past where we had more storage platforms than we had storage engineers. We've managed to cut that down, which is good. 

It is cost-effective, which is important for a service provider, because you're competing with hyper-scale providers who do things at extremely large scale, who tend to kill you on price if you're not careful. 

I'd like to see more granular quality of service rules. So things like: I think currently there's not much room for maximum IOPS, but there's not an option for minimum IOPS for a given volume.

It's less about giving us more features and more about giving us ways to contractually guarantee the features that are already there. So something like performance is the classic one. It's more valuable to me to be able to contract the performance that's there, rather than have a new way of doing things, because customers are not interested in signing up for the "best effort, maybe" services anymore.

It's stable, absolutely. We haven't had any challenges with downtime or anything like that yet. We did a pretty long technical proof of concept beforehand, so we were pretty confident when we purchased it that it would be fit for purpose.

Scalability is an interesting issue, because most of our customers grow organically - 10, 20 percent range. But we have deployed it for single, large tenants without too many challenges. 

We have a government customer who wants to buy storage on demand. Basically, they want the commercial model of the public cloud and absolutely nothing else. Everything else they want to be to their specifications, and that's worked out quite well for them. They can add 40 terabytes, 100 terabytes at a time without too much of a challenge.

We replaced 3PAR with Nimble.

Everything is complex for us because we're an MSP with so many different customers who all have different, weird requirements. Nothing is ever simple for us, but Nimble was no more complex than anything else we have had to deploy for our customers.

We deployed Nimble about nine months ago, across all of our managed services customers. We've got about six arrays, about 400 terabytes of data provisioned on Nimble at the moment.

When we look to work with a vendor like HPE or any other vendor, there are  a couple of things that are important to us. Support is the big one. Is it onshore? Is it local? Are they going to care, basically?

The other one that's important is, what can we do together in the market? One of the competitors that we evaluated in the proof of concept talked a lot about what we'd do in the market, and then made press releases with my competitors, contradicting what they were saying the day before. So trustworthiness, when it comes to co-marketing and that kind of thing; that they're going to support us. Don't get me wrong, you don't expect to be the only partner they work with. But you want them to at least be honest about "here's what we can do together, here's what we can't."

High-availability, performance, compression, cost to performance ratio and InfoSight. We’ve increased our performance, removing disk-latency errors in our SQL environments, and provide more information with InfoSight. We are seeing 60% compression on our legacy data.

Provides the performance needed to meet business requirements of sub-3 second shipping label generation. Increased disk performance for all VMs, SQL databases, and applications, providing additional load capacity and faster response times.

Small tweaks to the management UI for usability.

CS300 since 2/2015, CS500 since 5/2016. The CS300 was initially purchased to support a project that required high disk performance and met all expectations. A year later, we proceeded with a data center consolidation, replacing our CX4-240s with a single CS500 and an expansion shelf. The data on the CS300 was migrated, seamlessly without downtime, to the CS500. The CS300 was then converted to a fiber channel array to support our legacy environments.

No. We have had zero downtime on both arrays, including through multiple software upgrades.

No. We have not pushed the arrays to their limits, but we did cluster the CS300 and 500 when we migrated the data. The clustering was easy to do and would provide the scaling if we needed. In addition, hardware upgrades provide us another method to increase scale without downtime.

Very good. The support is very knowledge and drive the case to resolution, even if it is not a Nimble issue.

EMC CX4s. Better performance, better cost, reduce rack space/cooling/power. We reduced our disk latency from 12-15ms to 1-2ms.

Straightforward. The most difficult part was connecting the iSCSI to the switches in a HA fashion. Nimble engineers provided great support in the setup. The planning documentation provided by Nimble simplified the setup. The software upgrade was very easy to complete to get the new array up to date.

Licensing is all inclusive, which makes it simple. Pricing on their hybrid arrays are very competitive.

We evaluated Pure Storage and EMC XtremeIO. We found both products could not scale in the way Nimble can, they could not compete on the price to performance ratio, and they could not provide a competitive right-sized solution.

Insure you have your iSCSI network ready. The Nimble agent on the hosts does require a restart. Data migration will depend on your application, our VM hosts were easy, while our SQL databases required planned downtime.

Nimble provides a rock-solid product, scalable with great support.

The AF5000 array is the primary storage for our iManage DMS 10 document management systems. It allows the best performance for users using the system.

It has allowed us to upgrade our DMS to the latest version and reuse the older array as the DR storage for VMware SRM.  The entire DMS system performance has improved compared to the old which was on a previous generation CS260G.

Having all-flash with two banks of disk for population is great for expansion. InfoSight is always one of the best out there for array reporting and troubleshooting.

The product is great.  When sizing the array based on requirements the option to add more network cards for throughput would be something to help clients.  Product Support is best in class as always.

We have been using this solution for three to five years.

No stability issues.

No issues here and we have a full bank for disk expansion.

Customer Service:

Customer service is great and they go above and beyond to help.

Technical Support:

Technical support is second to none out there combined with Infosight. Also having technicians assigned directly to you when needed is great!

No, we are a Nimble shop with nine arrays now.

Straightforward and very easy, as always.

Implementation was in-house, done by myself.

ROI will be determined over the next year, after we go-live.

When selecting a vendor make sure to validate with the vendor that the throughput is enough. With the AF5000, it is 2GB/s write and 4GB/s read, which we are maxing out. Also, ensure to get the right amount of network cards.

Also, make sure that the specifications meet the application domain and ensure the right amount of network cards are in the array.

Nothing else was evaluated.

Nimble AF is a great platform and is only getting better. On top of that, InfoSight's great technical support makes it an easy choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have used this solution for two years.

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

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

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

The initial setup is very easy.

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

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

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

We use HPE Nimble for deduplication and to compress data.

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

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

For me, Nimble has two main problems.

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

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

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

Nimble is a stable product.

Scalability-wise, it is very good.

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

I am also using HPE 3PAR.

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

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

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

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

Deployment and maintenance are done in-house.

We keep the versions updated.

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

In our company, it is the back-end storage for virtual machines and file storage.

On our website, there are many different business-critical things running.

We migrated from a hybrid cloud to an all-flash. We have seen our average latency go from four milliseconds to point four. Therefore, we are getting 10 times better performance down to the end user on everything. We have seen an increase in our IOPS by ten times.

Infosight is good. We watch the capacity side of it. That is about all we have seen on there. InfoSight does allow us to get servers back up faster. We run a lot of virtual servers, so it is about ten times faster from deploying until it is up.

I want to see the full integration with OneView. I know they have started it, but I haven't had a chance to look at and evaluate it.

Uptime has been a 100 percent in our environment.

The product is very stable. There was some concern about HPE buying Nimble, but I think that it has gone okay, so far.

It is very scalable.

The deduplication of all-flash enables you to grow without having to actually grow the storage. That piece of the all-flash enables you to really grow, not having to keep growing in the racks.

The technical support is very good.

We came from a spinning SAN to hybrid SAN to all-flash. We just followed that path. 

We moved to all-flash because we were pushing the latency of the hybrid so far it was unusable.

The initial setup was very easy. I don't even know if we had to look at documentation, except in the very beginning, where we have to consult in. The solution provided what we needed to set it up.

We did it ourselves.

The solution has improved our throughput, because when we move large data it is just that much faster.

Every user is ten times faster at doing whatever work they're doing.

Performance per dollar, when we looked at it, was the highest that we could get for what we needed.

We evaluated other competitors (Pure Storage and NetApp), and it came down to cost per a dollar of what you could get.

Pure Storage had better deduplication rates, but it just cost three times more.

The product comes down to budget, I/O, and the use case that you need. 

It is really efficient in the size that it is.

Biggest lesson learnt: All-flash matters.