HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• Extremely low write latency (for SQL Server)
• High performance
• Automatic QoS (~60 VMs on single array)

• No more RAID/pools/disk/LUN management
• Our storage administrator got to focus on the virtualization stack 99% of the time (good for him)
• We can run all our VMs on a single array and not have contention/bottleneck
• We consolidated three different storage platforms onto a single, entry-level Nimble resulting in less management and faster migrations

The admin GUI is pretty ugly. It works, but it requires a plug-in. I never had to use it since the VMware vCenter plug-in is so good.

I have used this product for three years.

We have had no stability problems at all. We have had 100% storage uptime for three years straight.

We have had no scalability problems. I’ve scaled once in three years. I bought a new generation array with more performance and capacity and I migrated my volumes while the VMs were still running.

With Nimble, I can scale in three ways:

• Upgrade controllers in the same generation array for more performance
• Add an array and cluster it with the original one for more performance AND capacity
• Add on capacity via expansion shelves

We made one support call in three years and it was resolved in less than ten minutes. It is absolutely the best support I’ve ever used.

We had local SSD, PowerVault MD3200, and EqualLogic arrays. We were not happy with EqualLogic’s performance and scale, so we consolidated it all into Nimble.

Setup was super simple compared to every other storage array I’ve used. Tips are easily accessible. Nimble’s forum, “Connect”, is very active and useful. The guides/wizards to create volumes and grant access were thorough.

All-inclusive licensing (encryption, compression, replication, etc.) is very nice.

The initial cost is high in the entry-level market, but worth it for features and performance.

Performance is on par with all flash arrays if you have 20% of your total data “hot”. Size the cache correctly and it will scream.

We looked at Pure Storage, Compellent, and Tintri.

Run a competitive PoC with your favorite arrays. Nimble will come out on top in performance AND price/performance.

The most valuable features are snapshot & replication. The snapshot is straightforward in terms of how you can easily manage your backup schedule based on your RPO & RTO. You can instantly recover your data in a minute when you need it from a specific point in time. The replication was very reliable and efficient for our customers because you can just replicate your data with a minimum 2 Mb bandwidth.

You know, here in the Philippines, internet bandwidth is one of the most critical concerns and with Nimble, bandwidth wasn't an issue for you to have a reliable disaster recovery setup (DR site) and amazingly, Nimble doesn't charge you any additional license cost no matter how big the data that you need to replicate.

• Upgraded models that doubles the capacity and performance

Just continue the updates of technology features; I expect there will be more updates in capacity and IOPS as models upgrade in the future.

I have used it for about two years; from the CS200 series and the CS700 series to the new models, which are the CS1000-CS7000 series.

So far, based on my experience in deploying Nimble in different industries such as telcos, manufacturing, retail, hotel & casino, etc., I haven't encountered any major issues in terms of stability because all of the components were fully redundant and aside from that, Nimble has a monitoring system, or what they call InfoSight, which gives you proactive support. The product appliance will send a heartbeat every five minutes to InfoSight just to make sure that all software and hardware components are working properly and 100% up and running.

We have not encountered any scalability issues; this was really a scale to fit. I can just scale up if I need to by upgrading specific components such as CPU, SSD & HDD. I can also scale out by combining different Nimble array models to have flexible adjustment if certain apps need more resources.

Technical support is 10/10. Aside from InfoSight, they have technical support on standby 24/7 when you need it. In terms of hardware replacement, they always make sure that they meet what is expected from the SLA.

I previously used a different solution, and I switched to Nimble because of its cost effectiveness, its ease of use and it is very manageable. Nimble simplified everything for me.

Initial setup was very straightforward. In fact, you can set up the product in just 30 minutes, as long as everything is ready; the checklist, etc.

Pricing is very competitive compared to other solutions. All the features are bundled in the product without any additional cost.

There are no licensing costs.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated other options such as EMC, HPE, IBM, etc. Among those brands, for me, Nimble was the most cost effective and simplified.

Please evaluate and review other solutions and from that, you can simply compare and experience the advantages of Nimble storage in terms of features, performance, cost effectiveness, reliability, and efficiency.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

It's definitely more of an appliance than a storage array in that sense. So from a "set it and forget it" mentality, it definitely is there.

Definitely ease-of-use. I've experienced many different arrays out there and Nimble is definitely there. The analytic side is very helpful on their info site. Integration with VMware is easy. There are not any additional appliance plug-ins to load beyond the basics. It works well.

I would like to see integration with OneView, at least for reporting or some sort of monitoring. Basic stuff like that would be nice. I can't think of any area that is lacking for what we use it for.

It is very stable.

I have used technical support. It is excellent. The best.

We have a slew of HPE products. Since we were a partner with Nimble prior to the acquisition, it was natural for us to use and sell their products.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very straightforward.

We only evaluated HPE. Our previous experience has a bearing on which vendor we choose. In terms of Nimble, I did a thorough technical evaluation and had discussions with the vendor and with Nimble themselves at the time. My questions were answered.

Try it. They have a VSA, so they have a virtual appliance. I don't know what the options are for testing it that way, but if there is an option to do a PoC, then give it a shot.