HPE Nimble Storage vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HPE Nimble Storage and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, NetApp and others in All-Flash Storage.
To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: May 2023).
708,830 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable feature is replication.""It's just very easy for general block storage.""On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.""The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are management and administration user-friendliness, provisioning, and performance.""It worked flawlessly.""The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring.""The availability and ease of use are the big features.""I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Pros →

"The most valuable feature is the management of Nimble Storage, InfoSight. This is like a cloud. That's really a very nice feature. I think that's the only reason to buy Nimble Storage.""HPE Nimble Storage is quick to release updates that fix bugs or problems and the failover has been good.""InfoSight - analytics sight that collects data for all Nimble arrays deployed""The solution is quite scalable.""The scalability is straightforward.""It's very easy to set up. It's very stable, and it has got great deduplication, especially for hypervisor users.""The capacity for data storage and compression is good.""Nimble's phone-home capability is decent. The compression, dedupe, and caching are also solid. Generally, I like the simplicity. It's almost a set-and-forget solution."

More HPE Nimble Storage Pros →

"Overall the solution is very good.""The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix""The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation.""The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem.""The performance of VMware vSAN is very good.""The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there.""I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable.""VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."

More VMware vSAN Pros →

Cons
"The price of the solution can improve.""I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more.""From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable.""Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography.""Automation could be simplified.""There was some complexity in the initial setup.""I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays.""There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Cons →

"It would be ideal if all these enterprise-class high-performance products would come at a cheaper price.""When we’re setting up the solution, making options available regarding the replication tool mechanism would be ideal.""There should be faster interfaces.""You could argue that it would be preferable if everything were cheaper in order to save taxpayer money.""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.""I have problems with the next servicer. For example, I have a new device and it needs to connect to Nimble.""We face challenges with hardware delivery.""Nimble Storage could increase its flexibility by adding more protocol options. Nimble mainly uses fibre channel protocols, whereas many other storage arrays support fibre channel, iCSI, and NFS protocols."

More HPE Nimble Storage Cons →

"I would like to see more support for applications. I think currently it only supports applications between two vSAN clusters.""The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability.""The updating process could be easier.""We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU.""The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex.""The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture.""The stability needs to be improved.""In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."

More VMware vSAN Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing."
  • "There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution."
  • "Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. You get what you pay for, but I have lost deals to similar solutions because of pricing. They include everything, and that's another positive about Pure Storage. They aren't trying to nickel and dime their customers for different features. It is all included in one price. The license is by capacity, and the price depends on the capacity and the discount we're getting from the vendor. You get the SKU of the physical appliance, support, and maintenance, and that's it. You're licensed for whatever feature they offer. It is all rolled up into the price of the appliance."
  • "The pricing is reasonable."
  • "When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us."
  • "We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
  • "There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
  • "I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We pay a one-time fee for terabyte licenses, and the support is paid yearly."
  • "There is a one-time price for hardware, and with the software support, everything is included, such as software upgrades. The licensing of the solution is included in the cost of the hardware and the support is an extra cost. We have purchased support on an annual basis, but you can purchase support up front for up to seven years. We usually buy five years and near the time of the expiry, we sometimes extend it."
  • "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."
  • "The pricing for this product is somewhat high."
  • "There is a monthly fee to use the solution."
  • "Once you purchase the solution, you don't have to buy any license for this Nimble product."
  • "The price of HPE Nimble Storage is good."
  • "I believe the array, maintenance, and everything totaled around $140,000 dollars."
  • More HPE Nimble Storage Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "This solution is expensive. Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs."
  • "I feel the pricing to be reasonable."
  • "In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."
  • "The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required."
  • "For a classical node plus storage solution, the price is higher."
  • "It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models."
  • "We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually."
  • "This solution requires the purchase of a license."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure… more »
    Top Answer:Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a… more »
    Top Answer:HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one,… more »
    Top Answer:HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. The… more »
    Top Answer:While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Nimble Storage
    vSAN
    Learn More
    Overview

    Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that  prevents data loss.

    Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray

    Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:

    • A much higher level of speed than similar pieces of technology. Pure Storage FlashArray maximizes the speed at which data can be transferred while at the same time minimizing system latencies that might slow the transfer down. Additionally, it offers users quick memory read and data access speeds.

    • A higher bang for your buck in terms of the storage capabilities you get for the money you pay. They are smaller in size than more standard storage technologies, but they offer flash memory, which enables users to store larger amounts of data than the current standard.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution. 

    PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."

    PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."

    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.”

    VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

    VMware vSAN Features

    VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
    • Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
    • Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
    • High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
    • Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
    • HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
    • Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

    VMware vSAN Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 
    • Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 
    • Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
    • Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 
    • Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

    PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

    A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

    Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

    Offer
    Learn more about Pure Storage FlashArray
    Learn more about HPE Nimble Storage
    Learn more about VMware vSAN
    Sample Customers
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    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
    Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization20%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization27%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Government8%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization24%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government7%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise51%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise36%
    Large Enterprise31%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise38%
    Large Enterprise41%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise34%
    Large Enterprise48%
    Buyer's Guide
    All-Flash Storage
    May 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, NetApp and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: May 2023.
    708,830 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage with 28 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 60 reviews. HPE Nimble Storage is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage writes "Proactive end-to-end management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with HPE Primera, Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) and IBM FlashSystem, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI.

    We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.