HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We primarily use it for storage.

The capacity for data storage and compression is good.

I would like to see some additional features included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for the past eight months.

It was on track, but I have problems with the next servicer. For example, I have a new device and it needs to connect to Nimble. 

I do not pay for it.

I would rate HPE Nimble Storage a nine out of ten.

We have two use cases for the solution. One use case is for our daily work. Another use case is our shared platform. We are a service provider and we have our shared platform to sell some power, some compute and storage to our customers.

The improvement of our organization with Nimble Storage really is with the InfoSight cloud. We are much more proactive. We are never surprised by problems, some disks or control breaks or something like that. The whole staff is very proactive, and we have no problems. We have very high availability of the systems, and that's the main improvement; the end-to-end management from the server, hypervisor, all the storage.

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.

The only area of the product that could be improved is if you have to buy additional storage, you have to buy a block. You can't buy two or four hard drives as you can buy for every other system. You have to buy a block of 24 disks, and that's normally very expensive. So if a customer calls and they want to expand the system for a few terabytes, you have to sell them an expensive solution, and it's the same for us. But that's just part of the system. That's part of the architecture.

A feature that would be a nice addition to the next release would be a filer option. A filer option so that you could connect the sim or NFS or chips like NetApp does for NAS functionality.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. We are very happy with the product.

I have been using Nimble solutions for about four years, since it became part of HPE.

The solution is really very, very stable. We have never had any issues.

The solution is scalable in every direction. You can change the controller online, you can add additional drives, you can add additional connectivity; it's really scalable.

For the Nimble part, support is very available because it's InfoSight. You don't need any first and second-level engineers because of this InfoSight part. And if you really have a problem, but we never have, then you will be able to contact the third level or the engineering. That's really a big improvement, this cloud solution.

We were still using 3PAR storage before we had EVA Storage System. We are a very loyal HPE customer for many, many years, for ourselves and also as a vendor. We have used HPE storage for ourselves for 25 years.

We switched to Nimble Storage because of InfoSight. You can say 3PAR also had InfoSight, but it was not the same quality. It's better right now. And for us, because we have customer systems in our infrastructure, it's very important to have very high availability in our systems. We have to get SLAs, the service-level agreements.

The initial setup was very easy, but we are used to installing storage systems. We have been a storage seller for many years, around 25 years. So it's getting easier and easier.

The deployment takes about one hour. It takes more time to build it in the racks and link the cabling, but the rest is very easy.

I do all the deployment and consultant work myself.

Once you purchase the solution, you don't have to buy a license for Nimble. All of the features are included. You never need to buy a license.

Before choosing Nimble Storage, we also evaluated NetApp and Dell EMC. The biggest difference was the management stuff with InfoSight.

Ninety percent of the Nimble Storage we have sold because of InfoSight. I would advise potential users to check their management ecosystem and not the storage. The differentiator, and for me the most important part, is the management of the system. Because every system is fast and has high availability. That's normal at the moment. 

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that most of the storage problems are not storage-related. Because of the InfoSight cloud, you can see the whole ecosystem end to end. It's not always because a system is slow that's part of the storage; it could also be a server problem, it could also be a network problem, it could be something else. With InfoSight, this end-to-end view, we saw that most of these storage problems were not really storage problems.

In general, the solution works great. We haven't had any issues with it.

It's very reliable. Even if one control fails, it automatically turns on the other controller and everything moves from one to the second instantaneously without any issues.

The product is quite robust.

Nimble is costlier than EqualLogic, for example. If they could reduce the cost, that would be ideal.

I've been dealing with the solution for the last three years. It's been a while. 

The solution has been very stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

We have dealt with technical support, and we haven't had any issues with them. We are satisfied with the level of support on offer.

I'm also familiar with EqualLogic.

The price of the solution is a little high, although the performance is very good. 

We are resellers. 

We are using the most up-to-date version of the solution, however, I cannot speak to the exact version number. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We haven't had any issues. 

We currently work with banks and insurance companies, who are our primary customers with regard to HPE Nimble Storage.

Our clients have been very happy with this solution and like the fact that it is very easy to install. They have also had no problems with migration.

The fact that you can manage the requirements is one the most valuable features of HPE Nimble Storage. The other is the rapid deployment time.

Our customers are also happy that they can easily manage the requirements from the very beginning.

I think the scalability of HPE Nimble Storage could be improved.

In Venezuela, we have to purchase the solution for two years and cannot obtain a secondary storage platform. So from my perspective, the scalability is not as easy as that of 3PAR StoreServ or HPE Primera.

I have used this solution for two years.

Our clients have not reported any issues, so I think that HPE Nimble Storage is very stable.

The scalability of this solution is not great in comparison to that of 3PAR StoreServ or HPE Primera.

Most of our clients used 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera.

The initial setup is very easy.

I think HPE Nimble Storage is less expensive than Primera and is the best solution for Venezuela. 

Our clients evaluated other options such as 3PAR StoreServ, HPE Primera, Pure Storage, and Dell EMC.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate HPE Nimble Storage at nine. It is less expensive than some of the other options and is very easy to install.

We use HPE Nimble for deduplication and to compress data.

We have a large number of customers that rely on high availability from this product.

The deduplication and compression capabilities are powerful. We see deduplication savings ratios at ten to one, and twenty to one.

For me, Nimble has two main problems.

There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time. Replacing the controller is what I see as the only major issue, although I'm not sure that HPE can do this.

Nimble has a limit for objects. We have it configured for VMware, so if you have a laptop machine then you have a problem because of this limit. Also, if you have a virtual desktop with a lot of VMs, such as 2,000 to 3,000, then it's a problem because the window has a limit.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for more than two years.

Nimble is a stable product.

Scalability-wise, it is very good.

I have been in contact with technical support and I would rate them an eight or nine out of ten. They are very good.

I am also using HPE 3PAR.

I also have experience with HPE Primera, which is a better product. It's a merge of 3PAR and Nimble and it's a more stable storage solution.

If I were comparing a group of products then I would rate StorageWorks MSA a five, Nimble a seven, 3PAR an eight, Primera a nine, and StorageWorks XP a ten.

The initial setup is very simple, and in fact, the simplest of these solutions.

It takes approximately four hours to deploy including hooking up power, cabling, getting it set up on the rack, and configuration.

Deployment and maintenance are done in-house.

We keep the versions updated.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are resellers. We provide products to our customers.

Unfortunately, we were not able to sell this product because it is too expensive. We use it in our own cloud. We created a VMware VCPP cloud to provide VMware services to our enterprise customers.

The performance and the processor are good.

HPE has very good technology in terms of storage, and they have very good support assistance.

The problem is the price. It needs to be improved.

I would like to see an added feature to auto-fix, or a dynamic alerting system on storage. This is very important because we would like to prevent a disk failure before it happens.

If we had some sort of AI in place to alert us then we could replace the disk before it occurs.

Also, we would like to receive alerts if space is over the limits. This is necessary for us.

I have been selling HPE Nimble Storage for a few months.

It's very stable.

It's a scalable product. We have one POC user in our organization.

Technical support is good. HPE has a good channel system in Taiwan.

Previously, we used Dell.

Nimble Storage is too expensive for our enterprise customers.

We are still trying other products. HPE GreenLake has very nice packaging. It's a financial program, and we used Nimble through this financing program. We didn't purchase it, we were testing. 

We are still testing other products, such as Dell Storage.

We have some local storage vendors, so we are not formally using it in production.

We are not able to recommend this product as we are still in the testing phase. We are still doing the POC tests.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The device works very well.

We like how we can report and access everything directly over the cloud.

The solution runs pretty fast.

The solution requires a higher availability.

The pricing of the solution isn't ideal. They should work to make it more affordable. It's very expensive.

I'd like to be able to configure the solution from vCenter, which isn't possible right now.

It would be great if the solution offered even more integrations and plugins.

We've been using the solution for three years.

The solution is very stable. It's been working for three years, and we haven't had any errors. There aren't crashes. There isn't any bug or glitch that affects the way it functions.

The scalability is good. It's easy to expand the solution as needed.

We have around 1,000 people working with the solution currently. We use it quite extensively.

The technical support is really good. They give us adapted support and it's very helpful. We're satisfied with the level of support we get.

I have experience with a few different solutions. Nimble is quite a large solution that runs well without errors. One of its competitors, NetApp, is good but hard to configure. You need to really be an expert to configure it. With Nimble, you don't have to be overly technical. 

I've also worked with Huawei devices in the past as well.

The solution has an easy initial setup. It was straightforward. We didn't find it to be complex. You don't need advanced knowledge, or to be an expert.

Deployment is pretty quick and takes just 25 minutes. It's really quite fast.

We had three team members deploy the solution. They also maintain it. They were all part of the administration team.

We were able to install the solution ourselves without any outside help. We didn't need any help from an integrator or consultant.

The solution is quite expensive. We can't really afford to buy a second device.

We've recently been looking at Pure Storage.

We're currently using model CS5000 and we're on version 5.05.200.

We are not yet on the cloud. We're on-premise. We installed it in our data center. In tests and features, they call it InfoSight. InfoSight collects logs and tries to send to the cloud. It's customizable, and it offers reports for you and any upgrade. It tries to give you information about your device.

I'd recommend the solution. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

Our primary use of this solution is to host business-critical applications in the cloud for customers.

We can have fewer resources manning and monitoring the storage and we can reallocate resources to work on other things while maintaining confidence in our storage solution.

We have successfully integrated various applications such as SAP Business One, Microsoft Dynamics GP, any of the ERP systems we have tried work.

The Nimble Storage solution has enhanced performance over the previous system.

I haven't got the details of the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) so I don't know it exactly, but definitely performance on the service is much better.

The most valuable feature for our organization is that the solution provides us access to the storage we need without having to have multiple storage experts on staff to address changing storage needs.

As far as what future versions of the product should include, I don't have any experience with what it is lacking. It is really up to the technical guys to determine what is potentially missing from the solution.

The uptime for the solution is excellent. So far, so good.

While we have not had the need to scale yet and we haven't utilized it, it does seem like the utility should scale up quite easily.

The storage capacity efficiency is decent. We get about 2.1 dedupe capabilities using the solution.

Our experiences with technical support have proven to be excellent so far.

We previously used a different solution and knew we needed to change our solution to provide storage for our virtualization. The storage solution we had previously could not provide this and so it was not adequate. It was a rented system from another company and we were not happy with the performance.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. However, we did need to ask some questions to understand how they do the LANs and other technical details of it. There were no major stumbling blocks.

We didn't use a vendor or reseller to deploy. We implemented the solution ourselves.

Our return on investment appears to be excellent. The product delivers a lot of return to our company in various ways.

We purchased the solution for something in the $80,000 range. It was a fixed-price option.

We had a couple of options that we were considering before going with Nimble. We also looked at some of the offerings from Dell. I think those were the two main ones. There was a third one, Tintri, which we were not happy with because of their bankruptcy filings. Nimble was the leading option coming out of the gate and ended up being the solution we selected.

On a scale of one to ten, I would say this product is a nine. I think it does what it promises and support is decent. The only drawback I find is the size of the components. They never told us that the hardware has a large form factor and we were barely able to squeeze it into our older racks.

Storage is a critical piece of our business and, with a small team like the one that we have, Nimble ends up being a pretty good system that fits our need while lowering administrative needs.

For anyone considering this solution seriously, I would suggest you do your research with other competitors out there and look at what you are using, what type of infrastructure you have, as well as resources you have to support your system. Based on that, I would do a small POC (Proof of Concept). The flash version is more expensive, but I think you can get away with this with a hybrid model. The solution we chose is a hybrid system which we found to be just as good as the flash system. We have another system that is flash-only and the hybrid appears to behave just as well. We accomplished that by just adding 20% or so SSDs and doing that gave us what we needed to achieve similar performance.

We have feeds into HP that give us the Infosight analysis. However, I'm not sure if we're doing it proactively.

The all-flash solution could be considered as positioning our organization for growth, but we also have a hybrid system which we find just as good as the flash. Either would position us for growth compared to previous solutions.