HPE Nimble Storage vs SolidFire comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.5, while NetApp is ranked #28 with an average rating of 9.0. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 2.4% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 99% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

SolidFire and HPE Nimble Storage are robust storage solutions. HPE Nimble Storage seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced features and superior performance.

Features:SolidFire's flexibility and scalability are notable advantages. It offers efficient support and competitive pricing that appeal to cost-conscious buyers. HPE Nimble Storage impresses with its predictive analytics, adaptive performance, and innovative features, which are considered more advanced than those of SolidFire.

Room for Improvement:SolidFire could improve its integration options and analytics capabilities. It also needs to expand its feature set. HPE Nimble Storage requires a more straightforward initial setup, better customer support documentation, and deployment enhancements. These improvements would make practical deployment easier for users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:SolidFire is praised for its straightforward deployment process and responsive customer service. HPE Nimble Storage also has a relatively smooth deployment but receives mixed reviews on customer service response times and support quality. SolidFire is seen as slightly better in terms of initial deployment ease and support efficiency.

Pricing and ROI:SolidFire is recognized for its more attractive pricing model and quicker ROI. HPE Nimble Storage, while more expensive, offers good value over time due to its advanced features and overall performance. Users feel the investment in HPE Nimble Storage is justified despite the higher initial cost.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE Nimble Storage vs. SolidFire Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE Nimble Storage vs. SolidFire

July 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of July 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 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolidFire is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh

Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256

Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.

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Ajit Pratap Kundan

PreSales Lead- Government & Defense at Accops Systems Pvt Ltd

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.

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Ramil Cerrada

Solution lead at Globe Mobile

A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance

The most significant benefit lies in its exceptional performance, driven by its Flash-based architecture. This enhances routing speed and, consequently, database performance. The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"The solution is scalable."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"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."

"The setup was very, very simple. When we got our AF5000, no kidding, we had it up in production within two hours"

"HPE Nimble Storage is quick to release updates that fix bugs or problems and the failover has been good."

"It's given us more time to do the important things, less time worrying about SANs and failures and picking up the pieces. It just works."

"It is easy to use. Not too complicated."

"The scalability is straightforward."

"InfoSight has helped us resolved an issue where the snapshots were growing too big."

"The quality of the service and management tools let us make contractual guarantees for storage performance for customers. That's something we couldn't do before."

More HPE Nimble Storage pros

"Feature-wise, it is a good solution allowing users to monitor and simplify their networks. The solution also provides its users with flexibility by enabling them to utilize its extensions."

"If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is."

"The simplicity of it."

"The system efficiency is excellent overall."

"Greater IOPS, speed, it's all-flash. So seeing that everything is going to all-flash, all SSDs, SolidFire fits right in there with the emerging trend in IT."

"We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability."

"Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that."

More SolidFire pros

Cons

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."

"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"I would like to see greater integration with Microsoft's Hyper-V platform."

"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."

"If they could reduce the cost, that would be ideal."

"I’d like to see in-line deduplication extended to Nimble non-flash (called “Hybrid”) arrays, even if it’s only the C500 and higher controllers that support it."

"The amount of firmware updates released seem excessive."

"HPE Nimble Storage could be improved with some critical application or servers."

"HPE Nimble Storage provides only SAN-based storage and does not support NAS-based storage."

"I don't think it is officially released yet, but the main reason that we chose Nimble is because of the sync rep feature. So, I would like to see that further evolve. This feature will be essential for our setups."

More HPE Nimble Storage cons

"When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming."

"The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."

"There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS."

"They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is."

"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."

"The user interface needs to be improved. Much of the client feedback involves comments such as "Oh, it's hard to navigate through.""

"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."

"The upgrade process could be better."

More SolidFire cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"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."

"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."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten."

"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."

"The pricing is expensive, although we do not pay anything in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"HPE Nimble Storage didn't require a license at the time."

"Performance per dollar, when we looked at it, was the highest that we could get for what we needed."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More HPE Nimble Storage pricing and cost advice

"Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."

"On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."

"We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"

"It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."

"The price of this solution is more expensive than others."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

36%

Computer Software Company

17%

Real Estate/Law Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

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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...

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What do you like most about HPE Nimble Storage?

The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs.

See all answers

What do you like most about SolidFire?

The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance w...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolidFire?

It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay fo...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolidFire?

There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS. This...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 28% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell Unity XT vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 16% of the time

HPE Primera vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 15% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 9% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 8% of the time

More HPE Nimble Storage Competitors

NetApp AFF vs SolidFire

Compared 100% of the time

More SolidFire Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

June 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Nimble Storage

July 2025

Download HPE Nimble Storage product report

Buyer's Guide

SolidFire

June 2025

Download SolidFire product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Nimble Storage

No data available

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

HPE Nimble Storage is a highly effective All-Flash Storage Array solution that aims to enable organizations to reliably store and access their data. Organizations across a wide variety of industries trust Nimble Storage to assist them with all of their data storage-based needs. It both tracks all of the IT architecture that an organization uses and protects that architecture from a variety of digital threats.

HPE Nimble Storage Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy HPE Nimble Storage include:

Increased security. Nimble Storage provides organizations with powerful layers of protection. It leverages predictive analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to keep businesses from suffering harm related to emerging threats. The AI and ML software identifies threats before they can threaten a user’s data.

Reduced costs and increase profits. Businesses that deploy Nimble Storage find that their overhead costs end up being significantly reduced by up to 49%. One of the reasons for this is that Nimble Storage uses a “pay as you go” subscription model which means that users never pay for more storage than they actually need.

Ease of use. Nimble Storage is simple for administrators to utilize. They can install it without any kind of outside assistance. It is also simple for the average administrator to manage without specialized training.

HPE Nimble Storage Features

Artificial intelligence. The backbone of Nimble Storage’s IT infrastructure is its AI software. The HPE InfoSight feature makes it so that administrators don’t need to make guesses when managing their data storage. It offers users suggestions as to what they can do to improve their storage performance.

Scaling. Nimble Storage gives users the ability to scale their data storage so that it appropriately meets their needs. They can both “scale up” or increase the sheer amount of data that they can store at a given time and “scale out” or increase their ability to perform effectively.

Hybrid storage. Nimble Storage has the ability to store data both on the cloud and on-premises so as to meet an organization’s storage requirements. Its multi-cloud feature enables users to seamlessly manage all of their data storage and utilization operations with ease.

Reviews from Real Users

HPE Nimble Storage is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its ease of use and its powerful InfoSight analytics feature.

Andrew B., Head Of Information Technology at Zambia National Building Society, writes, “It's a very easy solution. Whenever I have a question, I find they have already provided a solution for it.”

Prataparao D., Technical Solution's Consultant for HPE Storage Devices at Karvy Innotech, says, “HPE Nimble Storage uses the InfoSight platform and it is useful because we can identify the faults and can analyze the performance. It has many other features. This feature is the best that I have observed from HPE Nimble Storage.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

SolidFire delivers all five core elements needed to deliver newfound storage agility to your next generation data center and beyond. With SolidFire you can deploy new applications and capabilities faster, provide more agile and scalable infrastructure, increase application performance and predictability, enable automation and end-user self-service and raise operational efficiency and reduce cost.

NetApp

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

California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks

Buyer's Guide

HPE Nimble Storage vs. SolidFire

July 2025

Free Report: HPE Nimble Storage vs. SolidFire

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