What advice do you have for others considering Nimble Storage?

Try it out. Demo it. Just have somebody put it in front of you, so you can poke around and demonstrate how it works with a real environment. Check out a Hyper-V or VMware. VMware is a lot more integrated with Nimble than Hyper-V. Live migrate your stuff. Move your stuff. Send backups to it. Send it over across the wire to a DR. Everything just works, and that is what we want. It has been rock solid, 100 percent on time, and we have never had any issues with it. We receive about a 2.4x compression rate, even on our old HPE CS300. With the new HF-Series, we will probably achieve a lot more than that because they have a lot of deduplication, etc. Unfortunately, we just deployed that last week. So, we are still in the trial process with it. All-flash is coming down the pipeline. We don't have all-flash yet. We have all hybrid arrays. We are moving in that direction probably within the next two years or so. We don't utilize any public cloud or HPE cloud stuff yet. Biggest lesson learnt: Always go with a great vendor that has a great product.

This solution is efficient in more than one way. Not only is it high performing, but it is also more compact and fits better in our storage arrays than equipment from other storage providers. This helps out with space in the data center. We have experienced an increase in performance of ten to fifteen percent. This product has proven itself to be very reliable and we're looking forward to where it's going to take us in the future. Everything that they've told us it's going to do, it has done and exceeded. The biggest lesson that I have learned is not to run at any solution that is already out there. Really dive into what it is that you need. Find out what your baseline is, and have a number in mind from a cost perspective. Then take a look at what your priorities are. Is it cost, or uptime, or perhaps having a reliable solution? Always define what your parameters are. My advice to anybody considering a solution such as this is to always do your research. Look at everything, including peer evaluations, and always take your time. I have met a lot of people that try to rush into a solution and then end up finding stuff that they didn't think they needed. So, as much as possible, take your time and do your studies. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We like the flexibility. Anybody who is looking for a product that is easy to use and deploy, this is good. I do need to evaluate the security aspect of it, especially intelligence to counter any unpredictable growth. I would also like to see how to use the storage space efficiently, because we do, at times, suddenly come across big videos.

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.

My advice is that you bring it onsite and evaluate InfoSight's reporting. The biggest lesson we've learned from using Nimble is that it provides better insight with a single pane of glass. It's feature-complete for what we are looking for. I rate it a ten out of ten. We've been very happy with Nimble.

At my previous place of employment, I mentioned to my previous boss about this solution because it would have been good at my prior place of employment. They were in a similar situation. They had flash, spinning disks, etc. However, they used Pure Storage, Hitachi, and even some Dell EMC. When you have so many different arrays, or so many different companies, that you have to work with, it is very easy when there is a problem for a vendor to point their finger at another vendor. For a better chance of a successful integration, keep the products (and vendors) down to a minimum. I don't really have to do a whole lot to it. Plug it in, and it does its job successfully. The performance was already good. This isn't a reactionary, but being proactive. We are doing these measures to ensure that we don't have an issue. The biggest lesson learned is to keep using Nimble.

On a scale of one to ten, I would say this product is a nine. I think it does what it promises and support is decent. The only drawback I find is the size of the components. They never told us that the hardware has a large form factor and we were barely able to squeeze it into our older racks. Storage is a critical piece of our business and, with a small team like the one that we have, Nimble ends up being a pretty good system that fits our need while lowering administrative needs. For anyone considering this solution seriously, I would suggest you do your research with other competitors out there and look at what you are using, what type of infrastructure you have, as well as resources you have to support your system. Based on that, I would do a small POC (Proof of Concept). The flash version is more expensive, but I think you can get away with this with a hybrid model. The solution we chose is a hybrid system which we found to be just as good as the flash system. We have another system that is flash-only and the hybrid appears to behave just as well. We accomplished that by just adding 20% or so SSDs and doing that gave us what we needed to achieve similar performance. We have feeds into HP that give us the Infosight analysis. However, I'm not sure if we're doing it proactively. The all-flash solution could be considered as positioning our organization for growth, but we also have a hybrid system which we find just as good as the flash. Either would position us for growth compared to previous solutions.

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.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to only make changes in maintenance windows, even when the engineers say that nothing will happen. My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to go through a detailed sizing operation with HPE so that it can be appropriately scoped. We do use this solution for business-critical applications but it is too broad and there are too many to name a specific example. I like this product, but there is always room for improvement and nothing can be a ten. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We receive great support. We have had no unplanned downtime. Our experience with the product has been excellent.

Go with Nimble if you want the best. It is reliable, the support is good, and it provides us with good performance.

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.

Definitely, give the product a go and do a PoC. It fits my needs perfectly. Biggest lesson learnt: Sometimes, the simplest solution is actually a complex solution.

I would definitely point a colleague toward the Nimble product. Most of my peers are also at universities, and the product fits perfectly into what we are trying to do. As another administrator at another university, it will be key to what they are doing. It has met all of our needs. We haven't had any issues. They have been consistently innovating stuff and seeing it before we even think of the possible outcomes. We are consistently shocked by what is coming out. We do HIPAA compliance as a university. Part of that compliance has to do with how we back up employee files, which we do on the cloud, but we don't use the Nimble for that.

Look at the portfolio and decide what meets your needs because there is a wide range of performance that you can get out there. I've been burned before, a little bit, on some of the lower-performance arrays. You get them in there and within three months you have already maxed out the performance. So make sure you buy what you need. Get something that's going to be upgradable and last. Nimble has really met all of our needs and at a price we could afford. It certainly wasn't as expensive as a lot of other all-flash solutions that we could have bought. It does what we need it to do. It's expandable, everything is built into it, you don't have to go by other agents to do things, the replication is built in.

It is a good investment, especially on virtualized workloads. We have seen a lot of benefit there. We have not used it for other types of virtual workloads, both mixed workload applications and databases.

Do the hard work and it pays for itself. Do a PoC and, when you check your requirements, it will fill in most of them if not all. This solution is a nine out of 10 because it's not active-active. If it was active-active it would be a 10 because the data reduction is so good it's ridiculous.

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.

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.

I'd put Nimble at about an eight out of 10 because Pure storage reset our standard for what is absolutely the best. Pure is a whole different platform and not hybrid. I like Nimble, it's very good, it works, it's definitely cost-effective. It's not all-flash, so you don't get the performance of all-flash. But if you don't have a couple of million dollars to spend on Pure, Nimble is an excellent choice. In terms of advice, it gets down to budget. Nimble fills a need for performance within a budget that is in the sub-million dollar range. If you're going up over a million dollars, where you can just throw money at the solution, there is Pure and there is Texas Memory Systems and all those high-end solutions. But if you want enterprise-level storage and you want a hybrid, the Nimble has served us well.

I have had a lot of personal success with it. Our organization has had a lot of success with it. It has a very straightforward presentation. It does the job for a lot of customers, and it's a great enterprise solution for many of them.

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.

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.

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.

I am actually here, at the HPE Discover 2018 conference, to find out what they plan on doing with Nimble in the future. We're also a user of the SimpliVity stack and I didn't feel that the roadmap for that has played out. We're here to see how the Nimble is going to play out. I'm very interested because we're coming up on a refresh cycle and we want to know whether we want to go down that path or not. I would rate it a 10 out of 10. I'm not being biased by any means. It checks all the boxes for us.

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.

Given the chance to evaluate Nimble it is highly recommended. Their CASL architecture is very fast and being able to get the performance from 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. Excellent support and customer service when you need it.