HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• Support, it is superb!
• InfoSight, especially VM Vision.
• Easy of setup and management, no need for storage experts.
• Performance, just delivers on all that it promises.
• Maintenance price is fixed for 5 years.

We do not need to employ storage specialists to set up and manage our storage.

InfoSight gives us in-depth knowledge to ensure our storage and associated systems are performing well, which is more than we could even get from previous storage systems.

Support for near synchronous replication.

Currently the smallest snapshot window is 15 minutes, that means if we replicate data from one array to another array we will be up to 15 minutes out of date, this is the RPO.

We have a small number of systems that need to be replicated in such a way that we do not lose any data if we need to fail-over to the replica on the second SAN, or at least it should be only seconds behind.

Some SANs, like NetApp, have a synchronous replication feature, so when data is written to SAN1 a copy is sent to SAN2, only when this has been written successfully at SAN2 does the data on SAN1 get flagged as written. This means both SANs are in-step.

This is great if you have the SANs locally and have a fast connection, but if they are in different data centres and the WAN link is slow you get latency issues while the data is written and acknowledged by SAN2.

When I talk about near synchronous replication I am thinking of how DoubleTake from Vision Solutions works, I have been using this for over 15 years to do this type of replication.

This works by copying the block of data on SAN1 directly to the local volume, but taking a copy and putting it into a buffer. This means latency at SAN1 is not compromised.

The copied block is then sent across the WAN to the second SAN, where it is written and acknowledged back to the DoubleTake system on SAN1. Once the acknowledgement is back the local copy on SAN1 is deleted.

This means if any latency on the WAN does not impact the speed of storage on SAN1, although the data on SAN2 could be a little bit behind, but in most cases we are talking seconds at the mots, and once any congestion on then WAN link has gone the replication is nearly as fast as a pure synchronous system will achieve, so for most purposes it is as close to real-time as required.

If the WAN goes down, or you need to take SAN2 off-line for any reason, the only impact on SAN1 is the buffer grows with data to be replicated, and once the WAN or SAN2 is back on line this is flushed to SAN2 as fast as the WAN can transfer the data.

You need a ‘re-synch’ feature in case the volume on SAN2 is corrupted, this checks the CRC on the data blocks between the two systems and re-transmits any blocks that do not match.

• AFA 5000 - 5 months
• CS260 - 3 years
• CS210 - 4.5 years

No, none at all.

The CS210 is very limited and could not be expanded despite having spare slot’s for drives. But we were able to scale-out two of these to create a larger single unit.

But we have first generation hardware that cannot be upgraded unlike newer systems.

Amazing. Nothing is too much trouble, and they have a wealth of information they can access to help you.

• We had Hitachi AMS2100 SANs.
• The CS210 reduced the required rack size from 12 U to 3 U for more than double the performance.
• Price was competitive with Hitachi’s and other solutions providing similar performance, when including all licences and maintenance over a 3 years period.
• Much easier to set up and manage than all our previous SANs.
• Improved monitoring, and no extra costs for providing this.

Biggest problem was fitting the arrays into the racks – need to bend the rails (shoe or hammer required). Fixed in the latest models.

Took less than 30 minutes to get up and running and connected to our servers.

Simple – one price for the equipment, one price for the support and maintenance (fixed for 5 years), any updates and improvements and all licences included.

Looked at options from Hitachi, EMC, NetApp and HP.

Make full use of their Pre-Sales engineers, make them your best friend, they will stay with you for the journey and can assist you get the best out of the equipment.

Don’t be frightened of asking Support for help, if you authorise full data collection they can look at a wealth of information on your behalf covering more than the actual storage elements.

Ratings:

• AFA 5000 - 10/10
• CS260 - 9/10 - Only because the AFA is better as it has in-line de-duplication.
• CS210 - 7/10 - Limited expansion without adding further trays.

Performance, snapshot and replication capability. It’s also nice that they continue to add features at no cost through software updates. Their online portal InfoSight is helpful for tracking assets, health, utilization and other metrics.

Performance – our arrays can handle varying workloads effectively. Snapshot and replication capability – have allowed us to simplify and improve our backup and recovery capabilities. Their online portal InfoSight is helpful for tracking assets, health, utilization and other metrics. It’s also nice that they continue to add features at no cost through software updates.

We shifted from tape based backups to snapshot and replication based backups. That improved backup performance, restore time, reliability and reduced manual effort on managing the backups.

It would be good to have a built in way to index snapshots so that we’d be able to granularly see what files were in a snapshot and restore at a file level. We’re using an add on product from Commvault to achieve this.

4 years.

No.

No. The solutions are very scalable. There are multiple ways to upgrade and scale – adding storage shelves, upgrading flash, upgrading processing etc.

Excellent. Proactive alerting. Responsive phone support unlike many other companies. Our local field rep is always willing to help.

Many different SANs.

Quick to set up and configure.

Reasonable pricing compared to other SAN vendors.

EMC, IBM, NetApp.

Give it a try with a POC. This is one of the rare vendors that do what they say they will. Their sales team is very easy to work with.

High-availability, performance, compression, cost to performance ratio and InfoSight. We’ve increased our performance, removing disk-latency errors in our SQL environments, and provide more information with InfoSight. We are seeing 60% compression on our legacy data.

Provides the performance needed to meet business requirements of sub-3 second shipping label generation. Increased disk performance for all VMs, SQL databases, and applications, providing additional load capacity and faster response times.

Small tweaks to the management UI for usability.

CS300 since 2/2015, CS500 since 5/2016. The CS300 was initially purchased to support a project that required high disk performance and met all expectations. A year later, we proceeded with a data center consolidation, replacing our CX4-240s with a single CS500 and an expansion shelf. The data on the CS300 was migrated, seamlessly without downtime, to the CS500. The CS300 was then converted to a fiber channel array to support our legacy environments.

No. We have had zero downtime on both arrays, including through multiple software upgrades.

No. We have not pushed the arrays to their limits, but we did cluster the CS300 and 500 when we migrated the data. The clustering was easy to do and would provide the scaling if we needed. In addition, hardware upgrades provide us another method to increase scale without downtime.

Very good. The support is very knowledge and drive the case to resolution, even if it is not a Nimble issue.

EMC CX4s. Better performance, better cost, reduce rack space/cooling/power. We reduced our disk latency from 12-15ms to 1-2ms.

Straightforward. The most difficult part was connecting the iSCSI to the switches in a HA fashion. Nimble engineers provided great support in the setup. The planning documentation provided by Nimble simplified the setup. The software upgrade was very easy to complete to get the new array up to date.

Licensing is all inclusive, which makes it simple. Pricing on their hybrid arrays are very competitive.

We evaluated Pure Storage and EMC XtremeIO. We found both products could not scale in the way Nimble can, they could not compete on the price to performance ratio, and they could not provide a competitive right-sized solution.

Insure you have your iSCSI network ready. The Nimble agent on the hosts does require a restart. Data migration will depend on your application, our VM hosts were easy, while our SQL databases required planned downtime.

Nimble provides a rock-solid product, scalable with great support.

Great performance and capacity in just 3U. Volume collections with crash-consistent snapshots every 4th hour, without using up too much disk space (thanks to indexing and redirect-on-write).

Our hosting environment (VMware ESX-based) got a nice boost thanks to these products. We were able to decommission a whole rack of old FC SAN arrays (HPE EVA4400) and replace it with just a CS300 (3U). Lower disk latency and a whole lot greater IOPS values as well.

Perhaps more stability to the InfoSight VMVision feature. A couple of times last year, this feature had stop working for us.

Well, Nimble Storage have had some difficulties/interference during this year with their predictive analytics service InfoSight. Read more about it here: https://www.nimblestorage.com/...

(almost) every Nimble array in the world reports back to InfoSight with data and statistics about the VM’s and connected hosts, which InfoSight automatically analyses and presenting it in a neat way for the user. A very good service and a matter affect, recently (the last couple of weeks) it have worked flawlessly, and hopefully this will continue.

One and a half years.

Other than InfoSight VMVision, no.

No issues.

Magnificent. Quick response and assistance when adding a support case. Even if you create a case at 11:00 PM, or during the weekend, you will get a response shortly after posting the case.

Yes, we were using both older equipment (HPE EVA4400) and newer equipment (HPE 3PAR). The EVA4400 is now decommissioned, thanks to our Nimble array. Greater performance and capacity are the two main reasons that we switched to Nimble.

Very straightforward, no difficulties at all.

Unlike HPE 3PAR, there is no licensing jungle to find your way out of.

No. We got a PoC array delivered to us first, that got us convinced about the product.

If you're currently looking for a new storage solution in your environment, give Nimble Storage a chance. I can promise you, you won't be disappointed.

The most valuable features are ease of administration, stability, performance and customer support.

The SAN’s interface is easy to navigate. The processes to accomplish a task seem to have been constructed using the least number of clicks.

Performance of the SAN has been great due to the software algorithms for flash/spinner data writes/reads.

It reduced the complexity of managing multiple SANs.

The InfoSight continues to improve, but could use some more innovation.

We have used Nimble for 4+ years.

Our SANs have been extremely stable with only a few HDD failures over the past 3 years.

We have had no scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent; always reach skilled techs on first contact. Customer support is always available even with information accessible via documentation.

We previously used EMC. Storage administration was a nightmare in regards to LUN changes.

Setup was straightforward; intuitive.

It’s expensive, but worth it. Not much to say about licenses.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated Dell and EQL.

Take the time to purchase the proper head unit and port speeds.

Availability of our environment has exceeded “five nines”, along with performance being stellar.

Performance, reliability, InfoSight, the ability to upgrade the O/S on the SAN without taking it down, and cost.

Poor performance and reliability would adversely affect my company’s productivity, and thus would increase overall labor costs as people took longer to do their jobs. (Especially if and when critical systems were down due to an outage.) It would also negatively affect employee and customer perception of the quality of IT services.

InfoSight is extremely valuable, because it gives us (IT) a direct understanding of historical performance and capacity trends, including projected utilization based on those trends. This in turn allows us to perform capacity planning before we reach the point where it becomes an issue. Further, some of the information in InfoSight gives us a direct understanding of which of our virtual servers is the most I/O bound. That allows us to investigate the server and mitigate disk traffic through configuration changes at the server level.

Regarding uninterrupted upgrades, one of the biggest problems with upgrading SANs is the fact that (except for Nimble!) you have to take down the SAN to do so. This requires the quiescence of any servers relying on that storage, and thus a service stoppage. While this can be done on a scheduled basis as “scheduled downtime”, the fact that Nimble permits us to upgrade transparently WITHOUT service interruption not only improves perceptions of IT, but it also changes what is normally a multi-hour process into a 30 minute process… saving time and money.

Right now, all Nimble arrays offer data compression to disk, but only the Flash (SSD) arrays offer in-line deduplication. 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.

While I speak about “five nines”, the truth is we’ve had 100% up-time (no outages, not even planned) for over 3 years.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is extraordinary. Their technical support often helps us with VMware issues and related products when the issue isn’t with their SAN – which is almost always true.

We used NetApp. We switched due to performance and manageability requirements. NetApp was simply an average performer, and managing it was difficult.

The SAN setup itself was simple and easy. The biggest challenge we had was in changing our network to accommodate turning off Spanning Tree Protocol for that segment.

If you evaluate a SAN based on total cost of ownership, you have to consider the cost to the company for down time and maintenance windows, among other things. Their price structure for purchase and pricing for maintenance is excellent. Just as importantly, there are no “additional software modules” to buy at an added price. You get everything up front.

From a price/performance perspective, Nimble simply can’t be beat. From a TCO perspective, the stability alone pays for itself.

We evaluated offerings from IBM, HP, EMC, and a number of smaller vendors, such as AppAssure.

Be prepared for your staff to want to abandon all other SAN’s you may have in place. Make sure your network and network switches are capable of handling the performance, because it would be a shame to buy something so incredibly fast only to choke it down on the Ethernet side of things.

• Support
• Pricing
• Technical engineers
• Units are nice because its only one box, while, for example, ExtremIO was six units
• Setup was very easy because the software was user-friendly

• We now have a smaller footprint.
• I'm surprised at how fast the hybrid is.
• The whole technical staff expertise is very strong.
• It's resilient - you're only supposed to pull out two drives at a time, but we pulled four simultaneously and it still survived.

Currently there's no deduplication, and I would like to see that. Also, it's still slower than flash storage.

The VDI is supposed to be smooth, but we still saw a little delay in typing and performing general work even though we didn’t put much load into it.

The controls are built into the unit, and I wouldn’t hesitate to scale it.

The tech support is great. Within a few minutes of pulling drives, someone calls or emails right away to check up.

It was very simple and fast. It only took three hours, including racking, to set everything up.

All the features are included in Nimble, so there's no need to pay for features later on.

We were looking for a VDI solution that gave the same performance as a desktop/laptop. We tested PureStorage and ExtremIO, but chose to do a PoC with Nimble because others who were already using it were so positive about it.

If you're not using it for VDI, it's also good for general storage.