HPE Nimble Storage alternatives and competitors

We are using AFF for a few clients. It's a specific type of data we use for these arrays, not like a block kind of thing or regular data. A few clients have particular requirements about where we put all the data. We are primarily using FAS, and we have around four or five AFF boxes. We don't deal with AFF regularly. 

We're not currently using NetApp Cloud Backup, but we're planning on implementing it. I'm not sure because my architect is the one who manages the end-to-end services for NetApp. He makes all the decisions on the NetApp side whether we use AFF or FAS. AFF is a unified storage box, so we route certain data to AFF. 

AFF has simplified data management across SAN and NAS environments. As admins, we're always trying to reduce the complications on the technology end. We're looking at the product from a single perspective. It's more about how the team engages with it. If one person on a 10-person team isn't comfortable with the features, then that's where we have to improve our understanding and where the vendor can help us. With AFF, we haven't had this issue. The whole team is thrilled to work on the product.

NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.

If you asked me to rate AFF's effect on the flexibility of SAP and Oracle workloads, I would give it a seven out of 10. AFF is what we are using right now, but the team isn't fully utilizing it because our architect team is managing everything. We haven't had enough time to look into that. We were interested in that. It is easier to understand and manage. There isn't a need to dig into that. However, I'm on the backend side of things, and we are still looking for some relevant documents that can help us understand this aspect better.

AFF is user-friendly. A person who has no experience with NetApp can handle it comfortably. 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.

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. 

For example, my team is unaware of any product unless my architect tells us about it. Then the team starts digging. It would be helpful if they made all the documentation and training readily accessible to everyone on their portal.

We've been using NetApp since I joined the company six years back.

Stability-wise, AFF is fantastic. We haven't seen many complications, and before there is a possible outage, NetApp reaches out to us and lets us know what's going on. 

NetApp products in general are highly scalable. For scalability, I would rate AFF nine out of 10.

NetApp provides excellent support. We get valid and crucial advice from NetApp every time we interact with them weekly or monthly. I would rate their support nine out of 10 because I work with various products from multiple vendors. Compared to other vendors, I feel more comfortable reaching out to the NetApp team. 

For example, I tried to reach the NetApp support team for one of the issues over the weekend. My call got disconnected due to a network glitch, and immediately I got an email in my inbox as well as a call back from NetApp on my given number. That's how NetApp reaches its customers.

Positive

I do remote support, so I'm not working on the data center side. We have an on-site team that could better describe the installation and deployment. However, my impression is that deploying AFF is straightforward. 

The architect is the main person working with the NetApp products, and he does a deep dive before touching any product. Our team has minimal exposure to NetApp because our work involves a mix of vendors. We have people working on the NetApp side but not regularly. The architect spends a lot of time on NetApp in his day-to-day activities, and he makes the changes. He takes and gives recommendations about which product to use, whereas we provide remote support from a different region altogether. The implementation, changes, configuration, and decision-making are all done from the headquarters.

And once it is implemented, the remote team logs in and does the navigation part. We check the array and identify any problems. If we find anything, we immediately reach out to the architect. He's the one who engages with NetApp and relays information to the remote team. That's how we learn as an organization. We spend time on the products to gain knowledge and experience with vendors.

It's hard for me to speak to return on investment. We have a different team responsible for that. I support the technical side. A separate team procures new arrays. 

In addition to simplifying the management across a mix of solutions, AFF simplifies the cost. That was one of the main reasons we purchased AFF.

We are using two other vendor products as well. One is from Dell EMC, and the other is HP. I say the best competitor would be EMC. We get the same level of support from EMC as NetApp. But it's hard to compare the two. Each vendor has its own way of providing the service. AFF doesn't work the same way the other vendor's product does. They both are unique and work based on their own design. However, the navigation makes a lot of difference for the end-users, like admins.

It depends on if you prefer working with the CLI or the GUI. I'm more comfortable on the CLI in admin roles, but I like the GUI over the CLI if I compare the same thing with the other product. Each product meets the needs of the use case in its own way, but the navigation style is different. Depending on your preference, you might feel more comfortable with NetApp or other products.

I'd rate NetApp AFF nine out of 10. To customers who are considering AFF, I would say they can go for it without hesitation. If it's a choice between AFF, FAS, or something else, customers can choose NetApp AFF without a second thought. We are happy with NetApp. Out of all the solutions we've looked at, AFF is the best fit for our business requirements so far.

We are in the health industry and use this product for block storage. We have VMware hosted on our Pure FlashArrays and we have a Citrix environment. We also have Oracle running as our SQL database. Our VMs run from Pure.

We have also done a couple of PoCs with the Blade solution for using the file share system.

One of the requirements from our developers and test and development team is that from time to time, they want to clone the production environment. We are able to accomplish this within seconds, using a script. This is one of the best parts that I have seen. This feature is not available with other storage solutions.

Performance-wise, it is giving us a very good result.

We are happy with the data compression and deduplication capabilities.

The interface is user-friendly and very easy to use.

Taking a snapshot and cloning data is very easy to do. We can create a script and it will clone the environment. Similarly, we can replicate the environment from one site to another site, and we can restore the environment where we choose.

The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard. For example, I can see all of the utilization and it has port monitoring capabilities. With other storage vendors, multiple tools are required for this, and there is an additional charge.

Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases.

Integration with VMware tools can be improved.

The reporting can be better.

We have been using Pure Storage FlashArray for between five and six years.

This is a very stable product and we haven't had any downtime. We use this product extensively and I have seen that we have a 90% I/O load in our environment.

This is a flexible system that is easy to scale.

We initially purchased two FlashArray systems. One of them was small or midsized, and the other was high-end. Then, later, we started upgrading. As per the Everygreen contract, we get free upgrades. Every three years, we get a new controller upgrade, free of cost.

We have also upgraded our capacity and now everything is on the X series. We have four FlashArrays in total and all of our database users are connected to them. The infrastructure and database teams are directly involved with it.

The response from the technical support team is very good. We have not found any difficulties with their ability or engagement.

We have worked with solutions from HPE, IBM, and Hitachi. We don't work with any of these vendors now. We switched because Pure storage is much easier to manage. It is also more stable and it is very easy to work with.

For example, there is no shutdown procedure. If you want to power down the environment then you just unplug the power and that's it. Once you reconnect the power, it is up. With legacy storage, there is a shutdown procedure. You have to shut down the host, then the SAN switch, then the storage.

With legacy storage, there is also a procedure to bring it up. You have to power up the enclosures, then the controller, then the SAN environment, and then the server. We had to follow a long set of steps with more dependencies.

After a power outage, the storage devices from the other vendors did not always come back online. For example, we implemented a PoC with the IBM FlashSystem and a power outage occurred. The management tool crashed and did not come back up. We had to wait for IBM engineers to come and fix the issue. Whereas, with Pure, when the power came back on, the system came back online immediately.

The other storage systems were not as user-friendly. For example, I had a Hitachi G600 and I wanted to extend the block capacity. I had to spend between 30 minutes and one hour to complete it. It's quite complex. With Pure, that would be taken care of in seconds by going to the console, selecting the volume, and performing the reset.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy.

The day that we received the box, we unpacked it, racked it, and configured it. The next day, we were able to utilize it for production.

Upgrading the hardware, such as performing a controller upgrade, is a seamless process. We are planning to do a major upgrade and it will be done on the fly.

We engaged Pure to assist us with our implementation, and our experience with them was very good. The technical team came onsite for the deployment. If we have any problems then they will return to our site to help.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance.

You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced.

We completed a PoC with most of the leading brands.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that I can recommend Pure. We were the first customer for Pure Storage in the UAE. It's stable, reliable, and you can trust it.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Pure FlashArray is that it's user-friendly, easy to manage, and very flexible. You can scale out and it's easy to upgrade. The upgrade process is not complex and it can be done on the fly, without any disruption.

My main complaint is that the garbage collection mechanism draws heavily on the resources. They have integration with VMware tools, although they can improve it slightly, and I would also like to see some improvements in the reporting.

We have been using it heavily and all of our people are happy with it. This includes the DBA team. Whenever we have a requirement of it, it's very easy and it can be done within seconds. With our previous storage solutions, we had to spend more time looking into problems and they were not user-friendly.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We used the solution basically for all operations. We got our ERP, Citrix, email (there was about a two wall to 18 terabytes with email), et cetera, that we had on the hybrid and we had our ERP system, which demands performance. We had that on the solution's all-flash.

It improved a lot of our processes and especially our ERP. Our reports were taking from six to eight hours to do. Once we got this solution in there, we were able to get the reporting down from eight hours to under 20 minutes. Ultimately, we were able to deploy to get the reports in under five minutes, which was a huge accomplishment.

There were some good features. It did provide the call home, which was a great feature when it worked. 

It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome. 

The initial setup was fine.

Once you started pushing it, it would start to not respond properly and then we would have to reach out to support, to try to figure out where these issues came from. They couldn't tell us where the problems were. Their advice was simply to take some load off and then it would work fine. 

Sometimes there was imprecise information. If there's an issue with the system, to kind of pinpoint where the issue was coming from, for example, if it was network latency or a load link to a VM or load link to some kind of switch, it would have been helpful to know. 

I know they can't look at all the networks, however, as the solution is connected to VMware and the SAN and the switch, there should be more information on the system. I can't pinpoint anything, which is a problem. Their reporting needs to be much better.

I've used the solution for five years.

The solution as it is right now is not very stable. The stability seems to have eroded. It's gotten to the point we are concerned about crashes.

The scaling is okay. We can scale it up, however, the problem with our scaling is how do you scale up something that, when it was sold to us, was already on the way out at an end of life. Therefore, while we can scale up, we're going to scale up an unsupported product. 

Their approach is "Hey, listen, let's just buy a new product. And then you scale of the new product even better." 

With the scalability of the product when I purchased it, I was able to add four flash arrays, and we could add four hybrid storage drives.

We have 300 to 400 people on the solution currently.

When we first got the product, support was amazing, however, that is no longer the case. 

Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible. I had a major issue with things that were not working. I'd asked them for an ETA and they would make it more about them than us. It would be more than six hours before anybody would get back to me. That was unacceptable, especially when it's slow when it doesn't take it all the way down, yet slows everything down to the point where it's not working. While we're down they're treating the situation as not important enough to do a response time within an hour. I just find that unacceptable.

We're using HP. We moved over due to the fact that the product was declining, and we could get much better support and reporting elsewhere. 

The setup was pretty straightforward, however, when we received this version, we had a lot of problems. They had to replace the controller at least twice within the first three months. The guys did a great job, however, we might have gotten a bad batch of controllers, as we seemed to have many problems within the first six months.

The deployment was fast and on the first day, it was up and running, ready for our support.

We have two people that handle maintenance. It's pretty easy to take care of and they've found it easy to learn. They are network systems admins. They are just junior admins and they are able to handle everything with no problem.

We did the integration and installation in conjunction with an Intelliflash support engineer. They're good. They're above average. Originally, when Intelliflash was Tegile, the support engineers were knowledgeable of whatever they ran, and they had the patience to assist and were very helpful.

I'm not sure of the exact pricing. Over three years, the support might have been in the ballpark of $15,000. We bought the solution itself outright.

Before we purchased this product, we were actually going to go with the HP brand called Nimble. We're familiar with the all-flash array technology. This solution was a good fit when it first came out. However, some of the politics and the management of the system that can support it are no longer there.

We are a customer and an end-user.

The solution is now out of support, however, we were using the most recent version of the product.

I tell my guys when they're looking for a solution, is focus on the technology, of course, and focus on the SLA and the response time. The difference between what I have now and the current solution is the response time. If I made a call now, in less than 10 minutes we get a level three engineer. That's important. As much as I have great IT sys admins and they can resolve anything, sometimes it's just about being able to call at any time and have somebody there that knows what he's talking about and is able to help us from a level three perspective.

I'd rate the solution at a seven. It's a good product, however, their technical support is very bad.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado is used for system backups.

The most valuable features are the five chips architecture and the purpose-built NVMe hard disk drive. Additionally, the IOPS feature is good.

The data compression and deduplication ratio of Huawei OceanStor Dorado is not as good as other solutions, such as EMC and Pure Storage. It is important when looking at capacity effectiveness.

The solution should be properly sized because if it is not there could be flexibility issues. The system should be sized properly and once it is delivered to the customer, they should ensure everything was done correctly.

When the US and China political issues come into play they have issues in qualifying the US applications with their new storage models. Many issues can arise. For example, customers might want to use Oracle hardware with their Huawei hardware to solve some of their use cases but the companies will not coordinate with each other. The political situation makes Huawei OceanStor Dorado not integrate well.

In an upcoming release, it would be a benefit to have better algorithms on data reduction, data compression, and data deduplication.

I have been using Huawei OceanStor Dorado for approximately two years.

Huawei claims if you choose their enterprise controller, such as the 8000, when you have a cluster of eight controllers, up to seven controllers can be down, and you can still be in operation. However, with their feature Metro Cluster that can be achieved by having 70 kilometers across two-site, you can have seven, nine.

The solution is stable enough as long as you do not do mistakes during implementation.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado has amazing scalability. As long as the specifications are correct in relation to the datasheets, there are no other storages that can provide a high level of scalability for scale-up and scale-out. 

It has the capacity of adding up to 16 or even 32 controllers. Both the EMC and IBM cannot add expansion boxes with their controllers but Huawei OceanStor Dorado has it in their architecture. You can have hard drives without adding the controllers.

The technical support is good. They have has shifted the support to their Dubai region. They now have proper infrastructure. They're Egypt's support and all the support agents are good in communication. Previously Huawei was having communication issues. The engineers were in China and they were having issues, but they have become much more professionals and they are ready to do RCA without any additional cost.

IBM does root cause analysis and I have seen Huawei support do root cause analysis which is a plus point.

In our implementation there are complications. I am not a technician but I have heard it requires eight hard drives to set up. For example, if customers are looking for NAS and SAN and want to have a small cluster of hard disk drives to enable both of these features. You can't do it because you need eight hard disk drives for a separate pool. For NAS, you will again need eight hard disk drives. You will need a total of 16 hard drives to make it a NAS and SAN storage system functional.

Huawei has very good pricing. They have some promotions that can be taken advantage of at certain times of the year, such as the end of December. They are providing aggressive pricing. In the Pakistan market, they are ready to beat any vendor in Pakistan because they want to grab the market.

I have evaluated products from many vendors, such as IBM, HPE, EMC, and Pure Storage.

I'm not sure exactly what features, attract customers, but Huawei is very popular in Pakistan. Huawei is taking share away from EMC and IBM and their hard disk drive, the NVMe, is not just a hard drive, but they have engineered it for the solution.

Some customers who don't like Huawei, say they're not coming up with Intel processors but only coming out with Kunpeng. This is not a negative point but some competition tries to create negativity for Huawei products.

All these storage solutions are only commodity hardware. Everybody is focusing on the cost per terabyte. A CTO should look at the capacity, cost per terabyte, SLA offered, and type of IT equipment offered. The performance key milestones, such as IOPS, the bandwidth of the storage, and which product is providing minimal latency. If these are the milestones a CTO wants to achieve. I think Huawei is one of the best products that can achieve all of these aspects other than pricing. I would recommend organizations to consider Huawei OceanStor Dorado.

I rate Huawei OceanStor Dorado a nine out of ten.

Dell Unity XT is used for data storage at a data center.

Dell Unity XT has improved our organization's performance. We have seen reduced management times.

The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is data duplication. Additionally, the management interface is simple, and is not a hassle using it. You don't need too much to learn or to be familiarized with it.

Dell Unity XT could add a unit-to-unit replication. We haven't seen that because we don't have an additional one to test. However, it is not an improvement, but something that we would like to have visibility on how it's done or how it works.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for approximately two years.

Dell Unity XT is a very stable and reliable solution. We can leave the solution alone for a month without needing to check on how the unit is operating, or if there are problems. We realized the benefit of using the solution in approximately one year of use.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is good because during the period of one year we noticed we had the need to add more and more systems, and more components to it and we were able to do it with no hassle. We do not plan to increase our usage.

We have approximately 500 endpoints using this solution.

The support from Dell Unity XT is good. They actively monitor the units. They have called us up when they have lost connection to one of the units to then take action. We have not had any issues to have needed to contact the support directly.

I rate the support of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

Positive

I was previously using HP High-Performance Unit Storages. There was a need to purchase a new unit because we were struggling with the resources, performance, support, and other aspects. The best solution that was on offer that came to us was Dell Unity XT. The company decided to move to it and buy the full flash version to support all the applications that we have on-site.

The initial setup of Dell Unity XT was straightforward because we had Dell representatives involved with our team. 

We had to do a migration because we wanted to ensure that there was no downtime during the migration process from the old solution to the Dell Unity XT.  To complete everything live without the business noticing that something is going on in the background. 

You cannot have two groups of equipment that are deployed at the same time. For example, the host, storage, and switches. We had to ensure that everything is deployed, updated, and then do the connections between the two solutions and start with the migrations.

We use Dell representatives for the implementation of the solution. We ended up doing the configurations ourselves without needing the support. 80 percent of the deployment we did ourselves. We had two people involved in the deployment and the solution has not required any maintenance so far.

We deployed not only the one Dell Unity XT but a bunch of them. It took us approximately one week for everything to be finished. Additionally, we deployed some hosts, switches, and other systems.

We have received a return on investment using Dell Unity XT.

We were able to solve the performance issues we were having. Our core communications and infrastructure is dependent on these units. The fact that all of the systems that we have improved significantly in terms of performance. The organization has benefited or is happy with the investment they've done at this point.

We have received a full return on investment from using the solution for three to four years.

The price of Dell Unity XT is reasonable. However, if you are buying a custom solution, it can come at a considerable price. 

If you want to scale or add additional components, this is where the price starts to spike or become very complicated and expensive. If you purchase the components separately they can cost a lot.

We did not evaluate other solutions before choosing Dell Unity XT.

My advice to others would be for them to purchase the solution urgently if they need a backup solution.

I rate Dell Unity XT a ten out of ten.