HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

It is storage for our VMware vSphere servers. It is also a destination for some Commvault backups and replications. We use it for a number of things.

It has been three years, and the performance has been great. We have bought eight more since buying the first one.

In our organization, when people say "I need a new server," I say, "I have the space."

• Zero downtime
• Very easy installation
• Easy upgrades

My version does not have dedupe, it has compression. I know that they have dedupe now. I just need to buy it. 

I would like to see native network attached storage (NAS) functionality. Our customers are looking for NAS, and Nimble can't give it to them.

I have added expansion shelves on several of them. It is simple to do. You plug it in, you attach two cables, then you press one button, like "Add", and that is all you have to do, which is wonderful.

Technical support is very good. When I call, I get a top-tier guy right away. I do not call very often, but if I have a question, such as, how to tear apart this array and add it to this one over here, they tell me right away. It is great.

One of the sales guys was aggressive and he met with me several times. We were, frankly, very impressed and very surprised. He said, "How about if you try it out?" and I said, "Yes." It was try-before-you-buy, and it worked.

Previously, we had some HPE P4500 LeftHand network devices which were getting old. We switched because needed a hardware refresh and more capacity.

The setup was approximately an hour-long process, almost like a one-button process. It was just so easy. Compared to most things that I have ever installed, it was simple and amazingly easy.

The first two that I bought were incredibly expensive, compared to the last five to seven that I have bought. The price has come way down, and it has been a year or so since we bought one.

We thought about the HPE 3PAR, but it seemed to be pricey. Frankly, Nimble came in and sold us on their solution. The 3PAR guy did not really make a strong sales presentation. He just said, "Trust me, it's good." My reaction was, we can't just trust you. Whereas, the Nimble guy told us the ins and outs of it and gave us all the details.

Try it out. You will love InfoSight, their online viewing tool, it is a wonderful addition. HPE thought so too, so they bought it and are putting it in everywhere. It is great, no downtime, with no care and feeding from my point of view. It just works.

It has surpassed all of our needs, it has been great. I need to buy more now, I am almost out of capacity. I would give it an unqualified 10 out of 10.

They could probably improve an organization with just about anything. It is all a matter of ease of use, ease of the implementation, etc. From that perspective, I would like to think it has been able to accomplish what people want done in an easier way, so they can get other stuff done.

• The all-flash arrays, today people really want them. 
• Their hybrid stuff is great. 
• They do a good job of helping people do storage in a very simple way.

There are customers who want to do some different things with the Microsoft Resilient File System. There are some customers who want to do different types of connectivity. I do not know if I would call that an improvement, necessarily, because if you want that, you should get a different product.

We have not had any issues whatsoever from our customer base. 

I have heard of one customer who had a catastrophic failure. I do not know if it was caused by the product or something they did. From our perspective, the product is very stable.

It fits everywhere. It just depends on what the customer is trying to accomplish. If you are somebody who needs 30 petabytes of storage at rest, it is probably not the right thing to do. If you are somebody who is trying to grow a virtualization implementation of some sort, and you just need storage which keeps growing, that is where it should go. We have used this product in all of those environments, and we have also used different products at the really big end.

They did something very well that most people fail at, they created raving fans! The way they did that was by creating a good product, but more importantly, they created a tech support who supports more than just their product. If you called in and you had VMware trouble, most people would say, "That is a VMware problem," but they would get a guy on the phone who knew what was going on with VMware and help you. 

That was the number one thing which made us approve of it. After that, it was just their innovation; their continuing to just keep up with everything. 

Since they were acquired by HPE, I cannot speak too much about the technical support. They did have everything down better than anybody else. That was what drew us to them.

If you are a super small company, the product is probably not right for you. It is out of your price range. Anything from mid-SMB up to enterprise, it is absolutely the right product.

I am giving it a 10 out of 10 because I can't think of a reason why I would not. The product is good and always has been.

• 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.

In our company, it is the back-end storage for virtual machines and file storage.

On our website, there are many different business-critical things running.

We migrated from a hybrid cloud to an all-flash. We have seen our average latency go from four milliseconds to point four. Therefore, we are getting 10 times better performance down to the end user on everything. We have seen an increase in our IOPS by ten times.

Infosight is good. We watch the capacity side of it. That is about all we have seen on there. InfoSight does allow us to get servers back up faster. We run a lot of virtual servers, so it is about ten times faster from deploying until it is up.

I want to see the full integration with OneView. I know they have started it, but I haven't had a chance to look at and evaluate it.

Uptime has been a 100 percent in our environment.

The product is very stable. There was some concern about HPE buying Nimble, but I think that it has gone okay, so far.

It is very scalable.

The deduplication of all-flash enables you to grow without having to actually grow the storage. That piece of the all-flash enables you to really grow, not having to keep growing in the racks.

The technical support is very good.

We came from a spinning SAN to hybrid SAN to all-flash. We just followed that path. 

We moved to all-flash because we were pushing the latency of the hybrid so far it was unusable.

The initial setup was very easy. I don't even know if we had to look at documentation, except in the very beginning, where we have to consult in. The solution provided what we needed to set it up.

We did it ourselves.

The solution has improved our throughput, because when we move large data it is just that much faster.

Every user is ten times faster at doing whatever work they're doing.

Performance per dollar, when we looked at it, was the highest that we could get for what we needed.

We evaluated other competitors (Pure Storage and NetApp), and it came down to cost per a dollar of what you could get.

Pure Storage had better deduplication rates, but it just cost three times more.

The product comes down to budget, I/O, and the use case that you need. 

It is really efficient in the size that it is.

Biggest lesson learnt: All-flash matters.

It has vastly improved the responsiveness of our servers. It adds snapshots to help with our DR. The snapshots are sent across the way into our DR site, so we have DR copies of everything. It’s all around just improved the flow of everything.

Its speed, ease of use, and it has been completely reliable.

They keep talking about doing one-to-many replication. This is what we'd like to see, just to help with data replication.

I think it’s very stable. We've never, ever, had it go offline and we've been using it for three years now.

We've scaled up and have had no issues with that. It’s easy, and it doesn't even take it offline when you do it. It’s pretty awesome.

I have used technical support a couple times and they are very good. They keep going until they find a solution, if you're having a problem.

We were using a different storage solution and we weren't getting the speed that we needed out of it for some of our applications. We couldn't run an SQL server on our old one. It was just too slow. We looked into 3PAR , because at the time, Nimble was not yet bought out. We looked into 3PAR , we looked into some of the bigger ones and decided that Nimble gave just as good performance for a much lower cost point.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was probably a little complex if you never set up any kind of storage system like that. Other than that, it wasn't too bad.

We had the guy come in just because we had never done it before and their sales engineer really made it go a lot easier.

I'd definitely tell them to go with Nimble. I would suggest that they have the Nimble engineer come on site. They don't charge you for that part. This is just so you can get all the thing set up correctly the first time so you are ready to go when you put it into production.

When looking for a vendor, I look for reliability, the features that we need, and the cost.

• Simplified storage administration: Due to this, a dedicated storage administrator is no longer needed. Now, we can easily handle the storage systems ourselves.
• Very efficient adaptive flash technology: Even without having hundreds of rotating disks like we had in our former SAN system or having to buy all-flash storage, we get predictable and low latency numbers for all of our storage systems.
• Simple snapshot management: This assists us to manage our snapshots through volume collections and protection plans, and helps ensure that new volumes get the appropriate replication and snapshot plan applied. The overview of snapshot used storage and ease of use when cloning are remarkable compared to legacy storage products.
• Central monitoring and health check via the Nimble InfoSight: The InfoSight portal provides an overview of all our storage systems and their volumes, snapshots and protection. It collects data and creates both automatically generated tickets for any problems or risk of problems, as well as predictions of storage use based on usage trends.

For the most part, we have not encountered any stability issues. But there was one uptime-related firmware bug, which was possible to work around and fixed in a later release.

So far, we have not encountered any scalability issues.

We rate the support as very knowledgeable in the product platform

We previously used a different product. The switch was made to gain a less-complex design for setup and administration.

The initial setup was very simple and after one day of education, all technical staff were comfortable with the platform.

One benefit with the Nimble Storage platform is that is doesn’t contain any software licenses. All functionality comes built-in to the platform.

We compared both traditional vendors including NetApp and HPE as well as upcomers like Pure Storage, Violin, SolidFire, Microsoft Storage Server and others.

Embrace simplicity. You can dispense with in-house deployed administration tools or tricky CLI GUIs. All you need is just a simple and understandable web interface.

Depending on which product platform you are about to replace, you will either just gain far better and predictable performance or you will embark on a journey where you will have to leave the comfort of having a multi-protocol NAS into NFS and/or SMB file servers using Nimble block storage in the backend.

• Nimble InfoSight: Provides deep information about not only the Nimble array, but also some insight into the data that resides on it.
• Seamless OS upgrade

This provides for better decision making and forecasting of the evolution of customer data management infrastructures.

Additionally, the stability of the Nimble OS provides peace of mind even during OS upgrades, which are seamless and non-disruptive.

As a reseller, this product is an easy sell for customers who are price conscious.

This product could improve by adding support for file protocols such as CIFS or NFS, the ability to seamlessly migrate from one volume to another, and the capability to perform in-line deduplication.

Volume encryption must be done prior to occupying data on the volume. A data migration is required if the encryption requirement changes. This could be improved by being able to turn on encryption on previously created volumes without the need for data migration.

Our first customer that we implemented this solution for was 5 months ago.

We have not encountered any stability issues thus far.

There have been no scalability issues. We added an ES1 expansion shelf with no issues.

Technical support is very eager to close tickets. They should verify that the issue has been resolved before closing.

We are a provider of solutions. We will place technologies where they fit.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. Some understanding of Nimble’s network architecture is required.

This is a great solution if pricing and licensing is a concern.

We evaluated NetApp FAS, EMC Unity, and Pure Storage.

Consider other options if file protocols are required. Enable encryption at the time of setup if required, prior to creating volumes.

• Nimble InfoSight is an extremely powerful and useful tool. We log in daily to look at any new alerts, mostly ones that have been cleared without us needing to do anything, as well as using it as a capacity management tool and executive dashboards to present information to our senior management team.
• Other than InfoSight, Nimble snapshotting and replications, as well as the zero-byte cloning, are invaluable to us as a company and has greatly improved our offerings to clients over our previous storage vendor.
• We also like the new VMVision. This grabs stats from our entire VMware environment and allows us to troubleshoot all levels of our environment in one view. This helps to diagnose where the issues lie, either storage, network or the hosts themselves. This has been absolutely invaluable when we have separate teams managing each part.

We supply hourly (or more frequent) snapshots on our private hosted clients. Under the previous vendor’s arrays, there was large management overhead to keep these working.

Since switching to Nimble arrays, we have not only been able to keep triple the amount of snapshots as standard, using, on average, around 70% less space than keeping 8 on the previous arrays, but the management overhead to keep these going has dropped down to about five minutes a month. Now, using InfoSight, we can see at a glance what we have.

There is not a lot of room for improvement. All the items that we wanted to have implemented when we first started using Nimble arrays were either already on their road map, or added after listening to us, and all bar one have now been fully implemented.

These included:

• Active Directory authentication for logging into the management of the array.
• Full audit logging of all actions taken on the array.
• Full VMware implementation for managing the arrays. This has and will continue to save us a lot of time.

We have now been using Nimble Storage arrays for almost four years. We started with two arrays and now have 16, and support a further eight at client sites.

We have never had any stability issues. The Nimble arrays have survived an awful lot within our environment. We now have 16 arrays and other than a single hard drive failure and a precautionary controller swap (predictive analysis from InfoSight flagged a potential issue, so Nimble replaced the controller rather than risk downtime), the Nimble arrays have been our most reliable hardware.

We have never encountered scalability issues. Using InfoSight to help plan capacity, we know way in advance what we will need to increase performance or capacity. When we need to either increase capacity or performance, all upgrades are performed so simply and with zero down time.

The technical support from Nimble is second to none. Whenever we have called them, we get straight through to a technician, who does not follow a script designed to frustrate you and waste all your time. They listen to your problem, and what, if anything, you have already tried. Then they help and most of the time, any issues are resolved there and then on a single call. Sometimes we have called them simply because we do not understand something, or even a new feature that we wanted to use, and they are happy to dedicate time to us to explain and show us how to do what we want. We have never had an ongoing ticket with Nimble other than when they are awaiting a response or action from us, that we can only perform during weekends.

We used to use a different storage vendor. The two main reasons we changed were the terrible levels of support we received from the previous company and the arrays' performance. The support was important because once, when we had an issue with an array, we had a six-hour outage and the issue prevented DR as well as production environments working. The support was terrible, and it took months to finally resolve the issue.

Performance-wise, the arrays we had were simply not sufficient for our growing environment and the needs of our newer larger clients coming into our infrastructure. This, coupled with the management overhead required to simply keep the plates spinning on these arrays, prompted us to find a more-reliable, better-performing partner with a better support ethos.

When we first started speaking to Nimble, they sent us two trial devices so we could truly perform a PoC that matched our planned deployment. They also sent a senior engineer along for a day to assist us in setting it up. The engineer ended up not really being needed as the array setup is very simple. There are two methods, both shown to us by the engineers.

Since the initial setup, all arrays have been configured by my in-house technicians and usually an array is fully configured, and up and running within half an hour (this doesn’t include time to get it in our racks and patched). After accidentally shipping our arrays to the wrong sites, we were able to easily and remotely talk others through the reconfiguration.

The pricing for the arrays is very transparent. There is one cost for the array, and another for support. There are zero licensing costs. Whatever you pay for the array, you get all features included with full access to their InfoSight, knowledge base and downloads. It’s a very simple model, which our finance team love.

When we went to market, the team already had a good knowledge of other vendors, having used a good variety of arrays between us. Nimble were the first new array we got in to test. They blew us away with their performance and their support. The personal touch they gave us really helped, too. They took the time to learn about our needs and our environment. It was easy to decide not to go to anyone else.

If you’re looking to implement, ask for a trial; Nimble have been very accommodating with us and others. Their products speak for themselves and will show that the figures they post are actually lower than the performance you can get out their arrays. Speak to any Nimble client. There are lot that are happy to take reference calls. This alone speaks volumes for them as a company.