We performed a comparison between Dell Powerstore and HPE Nimble Storage based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, HPE Nimble Storage seems to be the marginally superior solution. Our reviewers found Dell Powerstore’s lack of a data replication tool to be an area where it can be improved.
"The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product."
"Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens."
"One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time. Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love."
"Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid."
"It simplifies data management for NAS environments with its ease of management, ease of share creation, and Active IQ feature. These features are good overall. It helps us manage data quickly and sufficiently. Also, compression features, like dedupe, give us a good ratio."
"We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted."
"You can add compute and capacity independently. We have sized the solution based on our current needs, but in the future we can choose to increase capacity if we grow our activity in the market. And if we have more business in our monetary system, we can increase compute. The ability to choose what we increase is a good feature."
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier."
"The simplicity and ease of use have been very valuable features. I have a very small team, and only half of the team is well versed in the HP product. Whereas if I bring PowerStore in, everyone can learn it because it will be new on the floor."
"PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes."
"Migrations are very easy and fast."
"The support is very good."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores..."
"The supportability of SCME drives for faster data access from the PowerStore and is the most valuable feature."
"It's very stable and fast, and I am very happy with the deduplication. It saves a lot of space, which is great."
"Updates are very easy to do when the customer is connected to the internet."
"The capacity for data storage and compression is good."
"It is easy to use. Not too complicated."
"The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies."
"I have found the convergence rate and deduplication the most valuable features."
"The management software that runs in the cloud is called InfoSight and it is very good. It is similar to machine learning software that monitors your hardware."
"The solution is quite scalable."
"I don't like the newest GUI. It needs more options. Some features have been removed. Oversight is not as good in the new GUI compared to the previous version. Though, it might be something that we just need to get used to."
"NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes."
"Some of the graphical user interface changes in the later versions of NetApp have not been as good as the older ones, like in the 9.5 era."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"Its integration could be improved."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support. I have noticed that if I sometimes call their customer care for a particular issue, they will give me another number and ask me to call that other team. It would be better if they could do a warm transfer. That would save customers time from calling all the numbers again and speaking to another team."
"Dell PowerStore is a good solution overall, but some models could support hypervisors better by allowing for more customization and flexibility for customer needs."
"It needs more mature code."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in."
"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."
"The storage could be improved. I would like a feature for how to best secure an appliance and the storage since we are connecting the container to the public cloud. I would like them to develop another level of security, making it more secure than from what they have now."
"The price is on the higher side."
"We are looking for the Dell PowerStore to become more mature to maximize our use cases."
"The solution could improve by having more granularity. For example, having the ability to go deeper into specific IO channels or specific latency issues that can happen would be a benefit. HPE has this ability on their side but it would be useful to have it on our side."
"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."
"A feature that would be a nice addition to the next release would be a filer option. A filer option so that you could connect the sim or NFS or chips like NetApp does for NAS functionality."
"The HPE Nimble Storage could have better integration with monitoring and machine learning system information solutions."
"I would like to have more administrative rights, for example, root-level administrative rights to the underlying OS of the storage array. We want more access to the kind of underlying infrastructure of the storage array rather than relying on support. However, most companies are looking to have more managed solutions which is the opposite direction of what I want."
"When we’re setting up the solution, making options available regarding the replication tool mechanism would be ideal."
"There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time."
"The solution should allow for easier configurations."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 25 reviews while HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 26 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while HPE Nimble Storage is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "Saves us power and floor space, and we can quickly assign new data stores for our developers' VMs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage writes "Proactive end-to-end management". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem, Dell PowerMax NVMe and HPE Primera, whereas HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with HPE Primera, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerStore vs. HPE Nimble Storage report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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