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HPE Nimble Storage vs HPE Primera comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
HPE Nimble Storage
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
10th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.3
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HPE Primera
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Nimble Storage is 2.4%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Primera is 4.0%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
Ajit Pratap Kundan - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool that offers protection against ransomware and other enterprise-level attacks
HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high, making it one of its downsides. HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high compared with any HCI solutions, like HPE's SimpliVity, Nutanix, VMware, or Dell VxRail. A person requires a special skill set to operate HPE Nimble Storage because there are hardly any solutions similar to Nimble Storage in the market. The product's support can be made faster and more responsive if HPE trains its partners in such a way that they acquire more expertise on Nimble Storage through the training sessions. HPE Nimble Storage is dependent on only VMware vSphere Hypervisor. In the future, HPE has to make Nimble Storage feasible with other hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix Acropolis, and RHEV, meaning it should be hypervisor agnostic.
Taufeeq Rauf - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a simple user interface and is useful for data replication
I use HPE Primera for mission-critical applications. My company uses the product as a storage solution for our machines. The availability of HPE Primera in our company is critical for us, considering that we operate in an HA environment where we can't have downtime since we need to deal with cheque clearance for banks. The product's interface is simple to use. I am satisfied with the user experience provided by the product. The ease of use of the product's interface has directly had an impact on our company's operations, along with the improvement in the availability and performance of machines. Compared to HPE Primera, I work with a much more reliable storage solution like Dell PowerStore. Compared to HPE Primera, Dell PowerStore's features related to deduplication are very good, and it also offers a physical storage capacity of eight TB, which can be expanded up to forty TB. I would recommend the product to others who plan to use it only after taking into consideration their usage and requirements. From the price and performance point of view, Dell PowerStore is a better choice. I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."
"The capacity for data storage and compression is good."
"The solution is quite scalable."
"InfoSight has helped us resolved an issue where the snapshots were growing too big."
"Even if one control fails, it automatically turns on the other controller and everything moves from one to the second instantaneously without any issues."
"The support from HPE is ten out of ten."
"They do a good job of helping people do storage in a very simple way."
"VMware integration, why is pretty self-explanatory."
"I have found the convergence rate and deduplication the most valuable features."
"It is stable and reliable."
"In my opinion, HPE is making good progress and moving ahead with InfoSight, which is predictive analytics and artificial intelligence."
"The system is stable, particularly with mission-critical solutions in place."
"HPE Primera provides me with system reliability and 100% data reliability. The storage is good and is consistently reliable and scalable, allowing me to use it whenever needed. The overall performance is great. The product is stable. The customer service and support is excellent. It's a commendable solution, especially suitable for online transactions. It is reliable in meeting data requirements."
"One of the most valuable features is the ease of deployment."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"HPE Primera is quite a stable storage system that provides good provisioning and allows for the changing of partition sizes."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the artificial intelligence for the storage inside of the software and firmware because customers do not like functionalities which require manual interruption."
 

Cons

"One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them."
"We need better data deduplication."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"There are customers who want to do some different things with the Microsoft Resilient File System. There are some customers who want to do different types of connectivity. I do not know if I would call that an improvement, necessarily, because if you want that, you should get a different product."
"It's a good product, but the implementation with the new systems is done via the cloud dashboard from HPE. I can't activate the system without a cloud connection, which is a bit laggy if I don't have the right firewall settings, making it take longer to implement the storage."
"The resellers did the implementation of the solution, we did not do it ourselves. We have ten people for the deployment of the solution."
"The most difficult part about Nimble was the fact that it didn't have a standard length."
"Nimble requires its DNS to work in order to interface with VMware vCenter is a little thorn in my eye, but I am being nitpicky here."
"​The backup solution that they are using now probably has not been deduped."
"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."
"HPE does not have suffficient storage."
"We've encountered issues in the past where maintaining a read-only state is essential to prevent data encryption when VPN access is impacted."
"The price of the product is an area of concern. From an improvement perspective, the solution should be made more affordable in terms of price."
"We have not had a good experience with support from HPE Primera. They can improve."
"The solution could improve by having seamless migration from other storage systems. The process should be made easier."
"The solution has good performance but it could improve further."
"We cannot use this storage for critical applications and data."
"One of the drawbacks of the model we purchased is that it is not running NVMe drives. Even though they say that it is NVMe-ready, it is still on the SSD drives. The model that we purchased has only eight hard drives, and only the ones on the top could work on NVMe. The rest of them are still on the SSD. Its competitors, such as EMC and Pure Storage, are moving or have already moved to NVMe. HPE should improve this solution for NVMe. HPE should also improve IOs in this solution. IOs in HPE are weaker than Hitachi and Pure Storage."
"The initial setup is not straightforward."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."
"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"Once you purchase the solution, you don't have to buy any license for this Nimble product."
"The first two that I bought were incredibly expensive, compared to the last five to seven that I have bought. The price has come way down, and it has been a year or so since we bought one."
"We have seen tremendous ROI. It pays for itself 10 times over in the matter of four years."
"The pricing is expensive, although we do not pay anything in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"It's expensive. It could be cheaper. I'd rate it a five out of ten in terms of pricing. We're on a yearly licensing. I haven't come across any additional costs. We just paid for three-year support."
"From a price/performance perspective, Nimble simply can’t be beat. From a TCO perspective, the stability alone pays for itself."
"The price is negotiable and when we first received the quote it was expensive, but after dealing with them and receiving a discount, the price is reasonable."
"The pricing is better than some of the competitors, such as Dell EMC."
"I rate the product's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis and the cost of GreenLake service is included."
"The license for HPE Primera is all-inclusive."
"There is only a one-time license purchase needed and no additional costs. If HP could reduce the training cost, then that would be advantageous to the seller."
"The product is expensive."
"HPE Primera is a little bit higher than Dell PowerStore...HPE Primera costs around 80,000 USD."
"The tool is expensive. I can say that HPE Primera is one of the costliest tools in the market."
"From what I see, this is competitively-priced and HPE are doing their best to stay competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
60%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
3%
Financial Services Firm
3%
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...
How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...
Which would you choose - HPE Nimble Storage or HPE Primera?
HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. Th...
What do you like most about HPE Nimble Storage?
The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs.
What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?
HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...
What do you like most about HPE Primera?
For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Primera?
I cannot recall the exact figures for pricing from memory, but it seems to be an acceptable and reasonable price.
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
Nimble Storage
Primera
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Ace Relocation, Atkins Nutritionals, Berkeley Research Group, Canadian International School, City of Hot Springs, Clackamas County, Corona-Norco Unified School District, Ideal Integrations, Linear Technology, P&O Maritime, Retail Apparel Group (RAG), Virtual Radiologic
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Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Nimble Storage vs. HPE Primera and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.