HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• Nimble InfoSight is an extremely powerful and useful tool. We log in daily to look at any new alerts, mostly ones that have been cleared without us needing to do anything, as well as using it as a capacity management tool and executive dashboards to present information to our senior management team.
• Other than InfoSight, Nimble snapshotting and replications, as well as the zero-byte cloning, are invaluable to us as a company and has greatly improved our offerings to clients over our previous storage vendor.
• We also like the new VMVision. This grabs stats from our entire VMware environment and allows us to troubleshoot all levels of our environment in one view. This helps to diagnose where the issues lie, either storage, network or the hosts themselves. This has been absolutely invaluable when we have separate teams managing each part.

We supply hourly (or more frequent) snapshots on our private hosted clients. Under the previous vendor’s arrays, there was large management overhead to keep these working.

Since switching to Nimble arrays, we have not only been able to keep triple the amount of snapshots as standard, using, on average, around 70% less space than keeping 8 on the previous arrays, but the management overhead to keep these going has dropped down to about five minutes a month. Now, using InfoSight, we can see at a glance what we have.

There is not a lot of room for improvement. All the items that we wanted to have implemented when we first started using Nimble arrays were either already on their road map, or added after listening to us, and all bar one have now been fully implemented.

These included:

• Active Directory authentication for logging into the management of the array.
• Full audit logging of all actions taken on the array.
• Full VMware implementation for managing the arrays. This has and will continue to save us a lot of time.

We have now been using Nimble Storage arrays for almost four years. We started with two arrays and now have 16, and support a further eight at client sites.

We have never had any stability issues. The Nimble arrays have survived an awful lot within our environment. We now have 16 arrays and other than a single hard drive failure and a precautionary controller swap (predictive analysis from InfoSight flagged a potential issue, so Nimble replaced the controller rather than risk downtime), the Nimble arrays have been our most reliable hardware.

We have never encountered scalability issues. Using InfoSight to help plan capacity, we know way in advance what we will need to increase performance or capacity. When we need to either increase capacity or performance, all upgrades are performed so simply and with zero down time.

The technical support from Nimble is second to none. Whenever we have called them, we get straight through to a technician, who does not follow a script designed to frustrate you and waste all your time. They listen to your problem, and what, if anything, you have already tried. Then they help and most of the time, any issues are resolved there and then on a single call. Sometimes we have called them simply because we do not understand something, or even a new feature that we wanted to use, and they are happy to dedicate time to us to explain and show us how to do what we want. We have never had an ongoing ticket with Nimble other than when they are awaiting a response or action from us, that we can only perform during weekends.

We used to use a different storage vendor. The two main reasons we changed were the terrible levels of support we received from the previous company and the arrays' performance. The support was important because once, when we had an issue with an array, we had a six-hour outage and the issue prevented DR as well as production environments working. The support was terrible, and it took months to finally resolve the issue.

Performance-wise, the arrays we had were simply not sufficient for our growing environment and the needs of our newer larger clients coming into our infrastructure. This, coupled with the management overhead required to simply keep the plates spinning on these arrays, prompted us to find a more-reliable, better-performing partner with a better support ethos.

When we first started speaking to Nimble, they sent us two trial devices so we could truly perform a PoC that matched our planned deployment. They also sent a senior engineer along for a day to assist us in setting it up. The engineer ended up not really being needed as the array setup is very simple. There are two methods, both shown to us by the engineers.

Since the initial setup, all arrays have been configured by my in-house technicians and usually an array is fully configured, and up and running within half an hour (this doesn’t include time to get it in our racks and patched). After accidentally shipping our arrays to the wrong sites, we were able to easily and remotely talk others through the reconfiguration.

The pricing for the arrays is very transparent. There is one cost for the array, and another for support. There are zero licensing costs. Whatever you pay for the array, you get all features included with full access to their InfoSight, knowledge base and downloads. It’s a very simple model, which our finance team love.

When we went to market, the team already had a good knowledge of other vendors, having used a good variety of arrays between us. Nimble were the first new array we got in to test. They blew us away with their performance and their support. The personal touch they gave us really helped, too. They took the time to learn about our needs and our environment. It was easy to decide not to go to anyone else.

If you’re looking to implement, ask for a trial; Nimble have been very accommodating with us and others. Their products speak for themselves and will show that the figures they post are actually lower than the performance you can get out their arrays. Speak to any Nimble client. There are lot that are happy to take reference calls. This alone speaks volumes for them as a company.

1. Simplified storage administration

A dedicated storage administrator is no longer needed. All of our engineers have attended the one-day training and has the knowledge how to handle the Storage Systems. With our former SAN systems we had to have an external contractor doing part time administration for us due to the complexity. Now we can easily handle the Storage systems ourselves.

2. Very efficient adaptive flash technology

Even without having hundreds of rotating disks like we had in our former SAN system or having to buy an All-flash Storage, we get predictable and low latency numbers for all of our Storage Systems.

3. Simple snapshot management

Managing Snapshots through Volume collections and Protection Plans it’s easy to make sure new volumes get the appropriate replication and snapshot plan applied, which is easy to maintain and change for all volumes. The overview of used storage for snapshots and the ease of use when cloning a snapshot is remarkable compared to legacy Storage products.

4. Central monitoring and health check via the Nimble InfoSight

The InfoSight portal gives us an overall overview of all our Storage Systems and their volumes, snapshots and protection. InfoSight collects data and creates both automatically generated tickets for any problems or risk of problems as well as predictions of storage use based on usage trends. This helps us a lot avoiding anything from volume protection configuration mishaps to prediction on storage outage.

Increased administrative simplicity and predictable performance.

• Improved snapshot overview in array management GUI.
• Possibility to apply centralized policies across multiple systems.

Close to a year. In total we're running about ten systems.

One uptime related firmware bug, which was possible to work around and fixed in a later release.

No, not so far.

We rate the support as very knowledgeable in the product platform.

Yes, the switch was made to gain a less complex design with regards to setup and administration.

The initial setup was very simple and after one day of education all tech staff were comfortable with the platform.

One benefit with the Nimble Storage platform is that is doesn’t contain any software licenses. All functionality comes built-in to the platform.

We compared both traditional vendors as NetApp and HPE, as well as up-comers like Pure Storage, Violin, SolidFire, Microsoft Storage Server and others.

Embrace simplicity – no more in-house deployed admin tools or tricky CLI GUI’s, just a simple and understandable web interface.

Depending on which product platform you are about to replace – you will either just gain a far better and predictable performance or a journey where you will have to leave the comfort of having a multi-protocol NAS into NFS and OR SMB file servers using Nimble block storage in the backend.

It's an adjunct storage repository and it compliments our 3PAR solution. We currently use it as a file store for backup, file, and compute storage workloads.

As an adjunct to our 3PAR platform, which is currently at capacity, it assists us in delaying the renewal of our 3PAR. It's an additional service on top of our storage solutions.

• Scalability
• User interface
• Reporting

Something I would like to see is more clarity regarding the positioning of Nimble versus 3PAR. I am struggling with the boundaries within which these two are competing.

I can't comment on scalability just yet. I've just bought three of them, and I've got another five on order, but I am architecting it on a scale set at the moment.

I had capacity issues, and my scale-out of existing solutions was not viable, so I had to look for something new. I was forced into a Nimble purchase through an acquisition that we made, so I became familiar with the product and then decided to expand the product.

I use it as a rudimentary backup, so it's not the most effective use for the hybrid storage solution that we bought. I have bought an All-Flash for some virtual workloads, and that was quite a cost-effective solution for us.

I think good evaluation criteria include checking the scalability of the product. I also think the reporting aspect of it is very complete.

I would rate it at eight out of 10, and the reason for that is it's not as flexible a storage solution as the current versions of 3PAR.

It's central SAN storage for all of our production and test data. It's fairly fundamental to our business. As a law firm, we have vast amounts of data that have to be incredible secure. It underpins the delivery of all of our services.

It's performing very well. We've had it for three years. It's exceeded all expectations since we had it.

It has totally taken away a layer of time and effort, management-wise, from two engineers to give that time back into developing more solutions. It has provided us essentially with a platform to go away and be more creative, knowing that that is stable and can do whatever we chuck at it.

Two things. 

• One is their support. You always get through to somebody who knows exactly what they're talking about. 
• The fact that once you've bought, any updates are just part of your subscription, so you don't have to buy add-ons for new features. You're continually adding value to it.

More reporting is probably the only thing that is really lacking. It would be helpful to go to the business and say, "This is how we've evolved with our solution, and this is why we need more." Being able to put forward a business case with data to back it up, essentially.

It's purely as and when we get to the point where, we're either on a refresh, or we just need more capacity, or performance, then it's something to take to the business as proof.

We haven't really had any issues with stability. 

We have had an issue we were trying to resolve, but the support with Nimble is fantastic. They were able to fix it in a very short amount of time. That was very early on, and ever since then it's been incredibly stable.

Scalability is very good. We've scaled over the course of three years. We've bought extra shelves, extra controllers. It's just very easy to do. Just plug and play. Plug it in and off you go, pretty much.

I was involved in the initial setup. We had a sales engineer come in, but he pretty much sat there and said, "Click here, click there." It was incredibly easy to set up.

We had an incumbent storage provider which was also tendering; one of the bigger storage providers. But we were a bit put out by their ability to provide us with any real reason to stay with them. They didn't seem to have any innovation going on, and their lack of ability to actually support and help us with issues was a factor.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that vendor's ability to support its platform into the future. Also, a track record of actually delivering a solution.

Nimble, when we went with them they were clearly a new company, but they clearly had marketed their product incredibly well, and knew what they were talking about. That was very obvious.

I give it a 10 out of 10, absolutely. I've worked with a lot of technologies and this, by far, outshone any other technology that I've ever used before; their ability to deliver, and ability to support their solution.

I'd say in the market of flash storage, there are quite a lot of vendors out there. Just take your time and don't rush into picking a storage supplier, just because a price looks good. At the end of the day, it underpins everything that you do, particularly if it's your production platform. Just take your time and actually consider your requirements properly.

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.

The primary use case is storage virtualization. We use it for public facing customer workloads.

We spend less time managing it.

The all-flash positions our organization for growth. It is much easier to use, and we do not have to worry about the I/O profile of the workloads that we putting on the array.

The solution has increased our throughput.

• Availability
• Ease of use
• Performance

The way the market is going, supporting NVMe storage would be useful as a step up.

The stability of the solution is fantastic.

The uptime is great.

The scalability is good. It is easy to scale out.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is as good as anyone else's that I have seen.

We find the support is pretty good. It is pretty easy to get a hold of the support team. They generally know what they are talking about.

The storage that we had was going out of support. We previously used mostly HPE 3PAR. We switched to Nimble mostly because it was simpler to administer. Also, the scale that we needed in Nimble was probably better suited for us than the 3PAR systems.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We deployed in-house.

I have not seen ROI.

The all-flash array has increased our performance. It has been good.

We buy the arrays outright, so we don't pay anything on an ongoing monthly basis for licensing.

We probably only looked at HPE and Nimble, and they are the same company now anyway.

If you are not going for the all-flash arrays, then try to understand your I/O profile and working set. That will help you with your sizing. 

Performance is great. It is still reasonably expensive, but the product is good. It does what it needs to.

From an availability viewpoint, it provides us with confidence that applications will be available when they need to be.

It does what it says on its own.

It has vastly improved the responsiveness of our servers. It adds snapshots to help with our DR. The snapshots are sent across the way into our DR site, so we have DR copies of everything. It’s all around just improved the flow of everything.

Its speed, ease of use, and it has been completely reliable.

They keep talking about doing one-to-many replication. This is what we'd like to see, just to help with data replication.

I think it’s very stable. We've never, ever, had it go offline and we've been using it for three years now.

We've scaled up and have had no issues with that. It’s easy, and it doesn't even take it offline when you do it. It’s pretty awesome.

I have used technical support a couple times and they are very good. They keep going until they find a solution, if you're having a problem.

We were using a different storage solution and we weren't getting the speed that we needed out of it for some of our applications. We couldn't run an SQL server on our old one. It was just too slow. We looked into 3PAR , because at the time, Nimble was not yet bought out. We looked into 3PAR , we looked into some of the bigger ones and decided that Nimble gave just as good performance for a much lower cost point.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was probably a little complex if you never set up any kind of storage system like that. Other than that, it wasn't too bad.

We had the guy come in just because we had never done it before and their sales engineer really made it go a lot easier.

I'd definitely tell them to go with Nimble. I would suggest that they have the Nimble engineer come on site. They don't charge you for that part. This is just so you can get all the thing set up correctly the first time so you are ready to go when you put it into production.

When looking for a vendor, I look for reliability, the features that we need, and the cost.

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.