HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

Great performance and capacity in just 3U. Volume collections with crash-consistent snapshots every 4th hour, without using up too much disk space (thanks to indexing and redirect-on-write).

Our hosting environment (VMware ESX-based) got a nice boost thanks to these products. We were able to decommission a whole rack of old FC SAN arrays (HPE EVA4400) and replace it with just a CS300 (3U). Lower disk latency and a whole lot greater IOPS values as well.

Perhaps more stability to the InfoSight VMVision feature. A couple of times last year, this feature had stop working for us.

Well, Nimble Storage have had some difficulties/interference during this year with their predictive analytics service InfoSight. Read more about it here: https://www.nimblestorage.com/...

(almost) every Nimble array in the world reports back to InfoSight with data and statistics about the VM’s and connected hosts, which InfoSight automatically analyses and presenting it in a neat way for the user. A very good service and a matter affect, recently (the last couple of weeks) it have worked flawlessly, and hopefully this will continue.

One and a half years.

Other than InfoSight VMVision, no.

No issues.

Magnificent. Quick response and assistance when adding a support case. Even if you create a case at 11:00 PM, or during the weekend, you will get a response shortly after posting the case.

Yes, we were using both older equipment (HPE EVA4400) and newer equipment (HPE 3PAR). The EVA4400 is now decommissioned, thanks to our Nimble array. Greater performance and capacity are the two main reasons that we switched to Nimble.

Very straightforward, no difficulties at all.

Unlike HPE 3PAR, there is no licensing jungle to find your way out of.

No. We got a PoC array delivered to us first, that got us convinced about the product.

If you're currently looking for a new storage solution in your environment, give Nimble Storage a chance. I can promise you, you won't be disappointed.

The most valuable feature is the NVMe flash storage.

We would like there to be more enhanced features.

I have been using the solution HPE Nimble Storage for approximately one year.

The stability and performance are very good.

The solution is easy to scale, but there are some limitations. We would like to add more storage but there are certain limitations.

We have a small environment, and six people are using this solution in my organization on a daily basis.

We had some issues with the configuration and we contacted support. We were satisfied.

HPE did the implementation of the solution for us with their certified engineers and it took approximately one week.

HPE Nimble Storage is more expensive than some of the other solutions, such as Pure Storage. They charge more for every feature than other vendors.

We are not utilizing the maximum functions. We are utilizing the protect facilities. 

HPE Nimble Storage is a good solution. it is useable in a production environment. However, the useability all depends on the environment. After a year if you want to renew the support, or have enhancements it is going to cost you more. Planning is very important.

We have switched from HPE Nimble Storage and we now use Pure Storage. 

I rate HPE Nimble Storage an eight out of ten.

We are resellers. We provide products to our customers.

Unfortunately, we were not able to sell this product because it is too expensive. We use it in our own cloud. We created a VMware VCPP cloud to provide VMware services to our enterprise customers.

The performance and the processor are good.

HPE has very good technology in terms of storage, and they have very good support assistance.

The problem is the price. It needs to be improved.

I would like to see an added feature to auto-fix, or a dynamic alerting system on storage. This is very important because we would like to prevent a disk failure before it happens.

If we had some sort of AI in place to alert us then we could replace the disk before it occurs.

Also, we would like to receive alerts if space is over the limits. This is necessary for us.

I have been selling HPE Nimble Storage for a few months.

It's very stable.

It's a scalable product. We have one POC user in our organization.

Technical support is good. HPE has a good channel system in Taiwan.

Previously, we used Dell.

Nimble Storage is too expensive for our enterprise customers.

We are still trying other products. HPE GreenLake has very nice packaging. It's a financial program, and we used Nimble through this financing program. We didn't purchase it, we were testing. 

We are still testing other products, such as Dell Storage.

We have some local storage vendors, so we are not formally using it in production.

We are not able to recommend this product as we are still in the testing phase. We are still doing the POC tests.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

• Nimble InfoSight: Provides deep information about not only the Nimble array, but also some insight into the data that resides on it.
• Seamless OS upgrade

This provides for better decision making and forecasting of the evolution of customer data management infrastructures.

Additionally, the stability of the Nimble OS provides peace of mind even during OS upgrades, which are seamless and non-disruptive.

As a reseller, this product is an easy sell for customers who are price conscious.

This product could improve by adding support for file protocols such as CIFS or NFS, the ability to seamlessly migrate from one volume to another, and the capability to perform in-line deduplication.

Volume encryption must be done prior to occupying data on the volume. A data migration is required if the encryption requirement changes. This could be improved by being able to turn on encryption on previously created volumes without the need for data migration.

Our first customer that we implemented this solution for was 5 months ago.

We have not encountered any stability issues thus far.

There have been no scalability issues. We added an ES1 expansion shelf with no issues.

Technical support is very eager to close tickets. They should verify that the issue has been resolved before closing.

We are a provider of solutions. We will place technologies where they fit.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. Some understanding of Nimble’s network architecture is required.

This is a great solution if pricing and licensing is a concern.

We evaluated NetApp FAS, EMC Unity, and Pure Storage.

Consider other options if file protocols are required. Enable encryption at the time of setup if required, prior to creating volumes.

• 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.

Nimble is a secondary VMware environment in our organization, so it's not running mission-critical applications at this point or responsible for complex business needs.

When we initially bought it, Nimble helped improve our organization as that was when we went through and we virtualized everything. Nimble was the back-end SAN for everything.

Now that it's owned by HPE, all of my SANs are under one support organization.

I haven't thought about what I might want to see in a future release mainly because we're trying to figure out where we want to head next: if we want to go with the Synergy system or if we want to continue down the hyperconverged path.

I haven't had a service call on it for three years. I would say that is pretty good.

We were able to take on and add the second one with the first one fairly easily. The second one was actually in Cincinnati and we brought it to Arizona. We had them separated and now they're co-joined.

We haven't needed any technical support on the two Nimble SANs that we've had, for the last three years.

They're now coming up on six or seven years old. I think we got our money's worth.

I would rate Nimble an eight out of 10, with cost probably being the big factor. It was a little on the pricey side at the time that it was bought. I came in late to the game, it was already in place when I got to the company. But, going back over the documentation, it was probably a little pricey.

The biggest thing from when they have replaced the old storage is that they have not had to touch it. That once it is set up it, it dynamically understands what data is being stored on it and where to store it, because they have got a flash array at the front, then obviously the standard style of storage at the back. There was not a lot of configuration needed to make it understand what their business was about and how it worked. It was just a big plus that once it was in, they more or less could forget about it.

It allowed them to concentrate on other projects that were obviously important for growing their business rather than having to worry about managing the storage, which is what they used to do with all their old storage.

Before HPE bought Nimble, we had a couple of customers that use it quite extensively, not just for storage of data, but also as their backup solution as well. So, we have found the advantage of it is the easy, rapid setup, but also that it is very easy to manage. 

Their remote management and understanding when things are starting to go wrong and their ability to fix them before the customer even knows, this has been a big positive when a customer makes the decision to go with Nimble.

The backup solution that they are using now probably has not been deduped. I think this is probably sort of one area that the customer is a little bit concerned about. It is a timing issue for them, though it is still working at the moment. It is just not giving them enough header space that they thought they would have because the dedupe does not seem to be working as well as it could. So, it is something that needs to be reviewed and to make sure the customer has not clicked a certain feature. 

I know for a fact that once they get in touch with HPE or Nimble, they will obviously look at the box remotely, see where there are potentially fine tunings, and if it is just a question of the customer having time to allow them to come online and review it, hopefully it will get solved.

Apart from that, everything else has been positive.

The occasional disk here and there goes. However, they turn up and swap the disk before you even know it. So, stability has been very good in that sense.

We have added a couple of shelves over the years to the product already. We still have capacity to add one more shelf to it, but obviously the product changes and develops all the time and allows the expansion, then you still have the ability to pull out the main engines and replace the controller cards on the actual box itself. You know you have a growth area forward in the product. It is not as if you have to throw it away and start again, when you hit the capacity. That was another advantage, it was easy to upgrade.

I can only really sort of comment when it was Nimble, because obviously HPE has only owned them for a few months now. From both a pre-sales and post-sales, I have always found them really good. They are very professional, know their products, know what they do, and very informative in terms of keeping the customer updated. For me, it is always just been a positive, which would be why I would always recommend them on to other clients, because of that.

Our customers have been looking at 3PAR, but:

• It is too expensive.
• It was not automated enough, in the way that Nimble is.

It is sort of one of those decisions that it is quite easy to make in terms of the Nimble solution for money for storage size regarding which is more cost effective. Also, the ability to set it up and more or less leave it alone to run itself. It is a big positive. 

• 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.