HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

Our storage solutions are stable and scalable.

The valuable features include encryption of data, hybrid performance, firmware updates, and overall simplicity.

The amount of firmware updates released seem excessive.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

The level of technical support is excellent. We are always able to speak to an intelligent engineer 24/7/365.

We used EMC Celerra. We switched due to the complexity of volume management and performance.

The initial setup was straightforward once the decision of connectivity is made.

It is expensive, but it is worth the “uptime”.

We evaluated other NetApp, EMC, and DELL EQL

Prepare your network properly if using the iSCSI protocol.

All features.

• Predictive performance
• 1/4 of a data center footprint than traditional SAN
• Predictive and flexible capacity/performance scaling
• Box license, unlimited snapshots/replications
• Better overview/monitoring/transparency in infrastructure
• Interoperability with other infrastructure elements

Further improvements on existing features, always.

Approximately one year.

No.

No.

Nimble technical support is only level 3, best support experienced compared to any other SAN platforms.

Previously used EMC VPLEX, VNX , XtremIO , IBM DS8800, and Storwize.

We switched because traditional SAN solutions are outdated and inefficient.

Very easy to set up, approximately 10 mins per system.

I strongly recommend everybody switching from traditional capacity-licensing models, to Box-license.

HPE 3PAR, Tintri, EMC VNX, and EMC XtremIO.

Try it.

It's definitely more of an appliance than a storage array in that sense. So from a "set it and forget it" mentality, it definitely is there.

Definitely ease-of-use. I've experienced many different arrays out there and Nimble is definitely there. The analytic side is very helpful on their info site. Integration with VMware is easy. There are not any additional appliance plug-ins to load beyond the basics. It works well.

I would like to see integration with OneView, at least for reporting or some sort of monitoring. Basic stuff like that would be nice. I can't think of any area that is lacking for what we use it for.

It is very stable.

I have used technical support. It is excellent. The best.

We have a slew of HPE products. Since we were a partner with Nimble prior to the acquisition, it was natural for us to use and sell their products.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very straightforward.

We only evaluated HPE. Our previous experience has a bearing on which vendor we choose. In terms of Nimble, I did a thorough technical evaluation and had discussions with the vendor and with Nimble themselves at the time. My questions were answered.

Try it. They have a VSA, so they have a virtual appliance. I don't know what the options are for testing it that way, but if there is an option to do a PoC, then give it a shot.

InfoSight, for sure, has been the best feature so far.

I really would like to see synchronous replication. This is something that when we have multiple arrays in our environment and being able to do something like a zero RPO. Being a law firm, we really want our data to be protected all the time. Although, we are really rocking the Nimble snapshots and you'll hear them talk about the maximum snapshots that you can have; there's no performance impact and it's just really cool to have that kind of data protection. We're utilizing it but getting further, so as to get the knob all the way down to zero RPO, that would be a really cool feature. I hear that they're working on it.

It has been incredibly stable. It has been so stable that when I started with the Nimble acquisition/purchase process for us, I was the senior storage engineer. However, after implementing Nimble Storage, I did a little bit of the setup, wrote the APIs for us to be able to work with it and then, I had nothing to do. So at the end of the year, when we're supposed to do our employer reviews and self-evaluations, I wrote this whole thing about why you don't need me anymore. Just told them, "Look, congratulations. You no longer need a dedicated storage engineer. Do what you want with that." They said, "Sure. We're going to promote you to become the senior manager of the network and infrastructure team." It's kind of a cool story, it is true.

We've already added another shelf just because we saw another need coming up. It was just so simple, i.e., literally plug and play and very laid back.

I've not worked with HPE support, only with Nimble support, which is right now separate and hopefully, it will stay that way.

Every time that I've worked with Nimble, I've had an absolutely excellent experience. Whether it be the automated, "Hey, we have solved this and already closed this ticket for you"; those are invaluable, i.e., 85% of the tickets are being closed just from InfoSight.

I'll give you an example where I saw the support really step-up, which was when we set up our DR solution. We're actually using DR from their Nimble Storage but it's not under our control. There's a little bit of a conversation that needs to happen and for whatever reason, that conversation wasn't working perfectly and I opened a ticket with Nimble Storage. That was the last thing I did. From then on, the technician who was working and looking at the auto-sups that were coming in. He was working with the other guy saying, "Okay, this is exactly what you need to fix or modify on your side. Let's try it again." I'm checking my email and then they're like, "Okay, we got it." That was it. It was literally a zero-touch fix for me.

We were using a different company before. There are actually several reasons why we decided to look at other vendors. One of which was that we had an unexpected outage with our older storage system for about 56 hours and it was significant enough that even though, we usually were loyal to that company we said, "Maybe we should start talking to other people." We brought in Nimble Storage as well as about three or four other vendors and we did a little bit of bake-off. We had conversations with the teams, asked for references and really when we started asking to put some of our workloads onto their appliance, that's when it really made a difference for us.

They gave us so many options of what we wanted to do. What had happened was because of the company that they were replacing, was one of those big iron-type companies, so they really wanted to just have a picture with their appliance next to ours. Nimble Storage came out and they racked everything for me; they plugged it in, they did all the setup and said, "Here it is. Here's your password. Go ahead and start carving out some volumes." Within probably an hour, I already had my first volumes already mapped and masked to the posts, all ready to go.

We do actually have a certain set of criteria that we use and it's a weighted criteria set. One of the top criteria, for us, is the relationship that you have with the vendor because everybody hopes that things are going to go right, but the real question is when things don't go right, is your team going to stand beside you? I have worked with the sales team and have said, "Hey guys! Is this pillow talk or is this an after-the-sale conversation? Are you still going to stand by me?" This is me, the customer, talking to the vendor.

They stood by me, more than did prior to the purchase. I get constant updates from them checking in, "Hey, do you want to talk about whatever?" I always feel well-prepared. We never had an incident where I really had to hit that red button, but I am 100% confident that if I did, then they would be standing there right probably in the room with me, making sure that I've got everything I need to get through this situation. This is a huge thing, i.e., being right there for us, which is reliability from an array perspective. It has got to have at least 5 nine's and that's just starting the conversation. We absolutely need the critical uptime and from there, there's also the price-point. For us, it's the vendor relationship, product reliability, and then, probably, the price-point while selecting a vendor.

It provides good performance, ease of use and ease of administration. The usage statistics, the cloud and their info site are all very good.

It's easier to administer than other storage solutions so that gives us agility to implement storage services.

Let's see, well you already have the old flash, I felt that was missing but, I don't know. It's a very good solution but the price is not the best, probably better pricing would be good but yes, it's a good solution.

We didn't encounter any issues with stability. It's good, very stable.

I haven't had the need to scale it, but it has good scalability.

Now that I remember I didn't use the technical support.

This was a new project where we needed a storage solution and we evaluated Nimble among others and we decided to go with Nimble.

I wasn't involved in the initial set up.

We evaluated some others but I'd rather not say which vendors. The features of the product, stability, performance, support and cost are important to us.

Try the solution, it's pretty straightforward to use and very easy to manage.

For Nimble, valuable for us is the hybrid solution that they have on flash and spindle disk. So we are able to put very flexible loads on our private clouds in Nimble.

Well it was simple for us to implement this technology. At some point, for the duration of the storage, we were using EMC basically. And also, the analytics piece that Nimbo has is very convenient because you have a lot of information in real time on how the CPU is behaving, on storage and different stuff.

Actually they already have a solution for all flash. So, we are planning to use that in our deployment. So, actually there were no issues with features, and we are waiting for the upgrade.

We have been running with this solution for two years.

We haven't had any issues so far with the stability. It is really stable.

Scalability is a little bit limited. I mean, they have different models and you need to make some upgrades in CPUs or storage. It gets easier at some point but we reach some limits and we need to make an upgrade right away.

The support is very good.

The setup was very straightforward.

Whenever we want some more capacity, CPU, memory, storage etc, then we normally make an analysis and basically we make the upgrades.

We have Nimble and Tripper, as part of the approved solutions. We have Tintri and Dell Compellent.

We have been working with HP on the server side for a long time and I think that now that they have Nimble and Tripper, they have very good and complete solutions. So we trust them. And they have good solutions because depending on the type of load that you are trying to put together, I mean, you can choose either one of these systems.

There were multiple things which helped our choice, but in this particular case, it was EMC because the EMC solution was not using the same technology so we were not seeing the benefits of having this on the analytics especially.

Well its price is very important but also the support. It has a global presence. We are in 35 countries. So, whenever we choose a solution or a standard, we need to define that very clearly. Response time and the technology itself.

I mean go for it. It's a good solution. It's a right mix between costs and return on investment. Definitely upgrade.

Improved performance. It's made my life easier. It integrates very well.

Deduplication and compression.

I would like to see SSL Certification. For someone like me who has been in the field for a long time, it’s easy to overlook. However, for someone who is fresh out of college, it will be hard for them.

The stability is good.

The scalability is really good.

I used technical support once. I would give them a rating of 10/10.

We knew we needed a new solution because we needed something for restored backup.

The setup was straightforward. It wasn't hard. I came from the background of NetApp. Compared to NetApp, it was really easy. It’s pretty easy to configure and easy to set up the volumes. It’s really good. It was more user friendly than NetApp.

It was a decision that was made before I joined to the company. The reason they chose Nimble over other products was because HPE required too many licenses at that time. Nimble didn’t require all of that.

Now that Nimble is an HPE product, HPE has changed their whole licensing for their other products as well.

The shortlist included HPE, Dell, and EMC. We chose Nimble because of all- flash, user-friendliness, and the compression and deduplication. It does way more than any of the other vendors. I have 10 terabytes with compression. That's a big change. Other solutions are not as user-friendly and cannot do all of that compression.

When selecting a vendor, I look for security. We want something that can be integrated and is compatible with our environment.

I would say jump on it right away, because it's really the solution. It is really user-friendly. It will make everybody's life easier. It's really wonderful.

The Nimble solution gives us hybrid storage at an affordable cost. We use it in our corporate IT environment. It's fast relatively easy to implement.

All-flash arrays.

The stability is great. I don't think we've had a failure since we've had it.

It's much easier. We compared it to Sentry, where we had to do forty-two upgrades for more space. Nimble just keeps letting us add arrays over and over.

We have used technical support and they are very good.

We used to use Sentry and we switched to Nimble. It was a Greenfield solution. When choosing a solution for storage venues, which is what I do now, the main elements have to be reliability and support. This is our game. Nimble is now a part of HPE and they just beat out the others.

I was involved in the setup and it was very fast.

The price is excellent.

Look at Nimble. It fits that median point of "I want something better than my own, home-grown solution", and "I don't to buy a product that is too expensive." It is squarely in the middle.