HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We use it in small business setups with 10, 15, or 20 VMs per customer. Our entire system runs on Nimble Storage, e.g., Windows Active Directory, Windows Servers, and WEP.

Everything is just faster. Though, it is not necessarily required for the deployment that we do. It just gives us a bit of that extra speed.

InfoSight has helped us resolved an issue where the snapshots were growing too big.

Speed versus storage space is the most valuable feature.

I don't think it is officially released yet, but the main reason that we chose Nimble is because of the sync rep feature. So, I would like to see that further evolve. This feature will be essential for our setups.

The stability is good. I have no issues.

The uptime is good. I can update without any downtime, so that is good.

The scalability is average. We had a unit that wasn't that old, which we couldn't extend anymore.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is good.

The technical support is awesome.

When it came to renewal, the requirements are based on customer demands and projects.

The initial setup is always easy. It was easy before it was part of HPE, so I am happy that they took this with them.

We deployed in-house.

The solution has increased performance.

Our hybrid solution could do with some more competitive pricing and more scaled-down deployments. Already, the smallest one is too much for us. We would flourish by having a smaller unit.

If you don't go cheap, it is eventually worth it. However, the initial investment is high.

We looked at Nimble and NetApp.

I have had some bad experiences previously with the performance of the NetApp units, which is the reason that we went with Nimble.

Go with Nimble if you want the best.

It is reliable, the support is good, and it provides us with good performance.

The primary use case is production storage. We run ERP applications, as an example, of our business-critical applications.

There has been no downtime, which is probably the best thing.

We use InfoSight predictive analytics. It helps us from a performance perspective by identifying potential bottlenecks.

InfoSight has identified controller failures or performance issues.

Performance and support are its most valuable features.

The uptime has been solid.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is good. We bought it in such a way that we could add disk to it, so we provided foresight into our purchase anyway.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is good. The new solution is doing deduplication now, as well as compression. The old solutions could only do compression, so it has been good that way.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. Our last solution did not.

The technical support is excellent. My team is extremely happy with Nimble Support and InfoSight.

We had performance issue on our previous solution (AF3000).

The initial setup was straightforward because we have a rep who we have dealt with for six to seven years.

We used a reseller, CDW, for the deployment. Our experience with CDW was good, but it was our Nimble HPE rep who really did the work.

The solution has doubled our performance, which is why we upgraded.

The solution has improved our throughput, keeping applications responsive.

It is a CAPEX investment. Over the anticipated lifespan, I would say the pricing is $10,000 a month.

The price has room for improvement.

Pure Storage and Nimble were on our shortlist. 

We chose Nimble because they were the incumbent. We had a good experience with them. They have good support. Ultimately, they had the better price.

We receive great support. We have had no unplanned downtime.

Our experience with the product has been excellent.

We use it to extend the data center a little further. We have videos which are very large in size and which cannot be compressed. We ran out of space in the data center so we moved the media data center and expanded it. The videos are a business-critical application. We provide videos for students to access 24/7.

We feel that we can rely on this solution more for the business-critical applications we have, compared to what we had earlier.

Also, the all-flash positions our organization for growth. Video quality keeps increasing. From 4K we are now moving to 8K and we expect that the size of each video file is going to grow very high. So our data size is increasing very fast.

In addition, we have noticed that the solution has increased performance.

We like the performance.

I would like to see more integrations. They might already have them, but I want to integrate it with the different hardware we have.

We moved to this solution for the stability. We had an HPE consultant configuring it and we went through some of those features that it enables. We also like the cloud-ready portion and when we move to the cloud that will be used as another factor in justifying our decision.

In terms of scalability, when I said "cloud," that was one of the things that we looked at when considering how we would grow, how we would expand. We are still evaluating. We do have some cloud storage, but we want to have one solution for that. We definitely think that with this product's features, we can go into the cloud and scale to whatever we like.

Technical support has been good so far. We had one issue up til now, but we are good. They took care of it.

We had legacy storage and my team recommended that we had to move to something new.

The initial setup was straightforward. We estimated, in the beginning, that we could do it over the weekend, and it went as we planned. We didn't see any issues.

We had an HPE consultant. Our experience was good.

We haven't evaluated ROI yet.

We had Dell EMC, as well as the company that was originally Sun Microsystems. We also had a couple of startups. We went with HPE mostly because of the familiarity and because my team recommended it because of its performance.

We like the flexibility. Anybody who is looking for a product that is easy to use and deploy, this is good.

I do need to evaluate the security aspect of it, especially intelligence to counter any unpredictable growth. I would also like to see how to use the storage space efficiently, because we do, at times, suddenly come across big videos.

It is our primary source platform. It underlines all of our Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 applications. We use hybrid, not flash.

It has reduced the requirement to have a specialist storage engineer.

InfoSight has allowed us to centralize our management, understanding how it correlates to the array. It has identified a network issue in the network configuration of ESXi hosts. It enables us to get servers back up faster by 25 percent.

It has stabilized throughput and provided less downtime for our applications.

• Simplicity of use
• Maintenance

I would like to have integration into cloud providers, apart from HPE.

The release cycle for the firmware upgrades could be improved. They are a bit long.

It's very stable. It is 100 percent up.

It's very scalable. We can scale it up and down.

We haven't had to increase capacity.

The technical support is fantastic.

The existing SAN was no longer a fit for purpose.

The initial setup was incredibly simple. It was up and running within half an hour.

We deployed it in-house.

It has increased our performance and allowed us to expand out what we can deliver.

Definitely, give the product a go and do a PoC.

It fits my needs perfectly.

Biggest lesson learnt: Sometimes, the simplest solution is actually a complex solution.

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.

The primary use case is to monitor my storage.

We are in radiology. Although most of our radiologists just read x-rays, there are moments when it is STAT read, where they have to read things ASAP. This applies to the emergency room and emergency departments. Sometimes, things need to be read, and it is a matter of life or death. This can also apply to cancers, detections, etc. Therefore, we need to make sure the storage stays up, and it is working. Then, our radiologists can do their job.

For us, it is about speed and stability. There are a lot of redundancies in place. I am able to access what I need to access. 

Our situation is sort of unique. We need fast disk for compute, but then we also need more traditional disk for our images. Having Nimble, where I can have both fast and traditional disk in one pane, and still see everything, is pretty awesome. 

We use InfoSight for predictive analysis because the answer to most of our problems is that, "It isn't our problem." However, we are being blamed for it. Thus, I can get my answers improved by using InfoSight that it isn't us causing the problem by going into it. For example, one of our applications was acting weird, and we had the application vendor on. They really couldn't answer much. As one of my troubleshoot methods, I said, "Let me check InfoSight." I logged in, and I could see a VM that was heavily pegged and almost in a critical-like status. That VM was the reason why the issue was the way it was. Now, It wasn't because of our infrastructure set up, it still was an application issue, but I was able to pinpoint exactly what it was based off of that.

That application with problems had about 30 servers. As I'm not an application vendor, I don't know which servers serve what purpose within the application. I was able to go into InfoSight, and it told me that one in particular needed to be worked on, so I didn't have to waste time looking at the other 29 servers. Therefore, I knew that one was the one that we work on, and that is the one that needs to be fixed.

We use a platform as a service and have multiple application vendors who comprise that platform. There are moments when those application vendors put the blame on us. By working in InfoSight, I am able to say, "No, it is not us." I can actually provide proof, either by using screenshots or through reporting. 

I wish they would put the InfoSight page back the way it was. I got in it for the first time about two years ago, and it looked the same for about a year and a half. Then, about six months ago, it changed. There are different options now. I can still get to where I need to go, but it feels like it takes longer, where before it didn't. Also, I felt like I had a lot more options before. I have to do a lot more to digging now to get to where I need to go. I just wish they had their old page back.

There are a lot of redundancies in all the right areas, so it is pretty stable.

I get alerts, email, and texts that I regularly check a couple of times a day.

I check the solution's storage capacity a couple times a day. One of the tasks in the morning is someone on my team will go in and take a screenshot of exactly what our capacity is at the moment. Then, we are able to do trend analysis and some forecasting of when we think our capacity is going to be close to maximum or not.

I have already already grown it and added an extra array earlier last year. I still have room for more. So, the scalability is pretty good.

This solution is not for growth, but it can grow. We have the capability to grow, but we're not there yet.

I rarely call the technical support, but when I do, they are good.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is a lot of plug and play. Although, there was a diagram of instructions, which was maybe one sheet long. So, it was easy. A lot of that stuff was already ready for me.

When I scaled up, the system came to me, and I did it myself.

We do use a reseller, Logicalis.

We are still too new with our product to know what the ROI is.

The solution has improved our throughput.

We looked at other storage companies. The fact that I can incorporate both flash and spin into one pane, look at Nimble and still get solutions. For me, it was a no-brainer.

This was the discovery phase. We vetted out quite a few storage arrays. This one was the one that we all came in agreement with.

We looked at Hitachi and Pure Storage. The reason why Pure Storage was removed from our list was because they only offered flash. We needed both flash and spin. 

At my previous place of employment, I mentioned to my previous boss about this solution because it would have been good at my prior place of employment. They were in a similar situation. They had flash, spinning disks, etc. However, they used Pure Storage, Hitachi, and even some Dell EMC. When you have so many different arrays, or so many different companies, that you have to work with, it is very easy when there is a problem for a vendor to point their finger at another vendor. For a better chance of a successful integration, keep the products (and vendors) down to a minimum.

I don't really have to do a whole lot to it. Plug it in, and it does its job successfully.

The performance was already good. This isn't a reactionary, but being proactive. We are doing these measures to ensure that we don't have an issue.

The biggest lesson learned is to keep using Nimble.

We use it for all of our storage, backups, and our user storage. Everything goes onto it. We have gone from multiple devices down to a single Nimble.

It hosts all of our databases for all of our servers. It hosts the servers themselves and our GFS retention jobs. It hosts everything that is critical for our business.

We went from hosting a lot of our external storage on ten different NASs. Now, we have all of our storage on a Nimble. Previously, we had three or four chassis just full of stuff. We consolidated our server space down to 25 percent of what it used to be, just from storage.

It is because of the way Nimble handles that storage. It can compress it down, making it smaller for us.

On some of our backup jobs, we are getting a dedupe rate of 11 to 13 times. Nimble is taking up a minuscule amount of actual raw storage for backups, etc.

Data management has improved vastly. We have gone from multiple devices down to a single device, making management much simpler. Previously, you could spend hours just going from one device to another, and now, it is all in a central location.

It has improved the throughput because of how the device interconnects with our network. It has 10 gig connections to the network and also multiple 8 gig connections through our Brocade switches back to the server farm. From just the sheer number of connections that it makes onto the network and devices, the throughput is staggering.

We have over 100 terabytes of storage, and it is all solid state. That is pretty valuable for everything we do.

The build alone is amazing and the way everything is modular. It's swapable. 

The storage capacity efficiency is phenomenal. It is off the charts in comparison to the compression ratios that we got before. We are able to save a lot more to the device.

I would like to see the network portion of the product improve, especially with some of the things which are coming out from Aruba and HPE. Both are innovating more of an automated networking. I would like to see our Nimble meld into that and do some automated networking.

The product is up 99.99 percent of the time, and it just stays up. We have it on multiple power supplies. The product runs constantly. When there is a problem, it notifies you of the problem. 

We have never had any critical failures with it. It is always up. Every time a single component is broken, it has been repaired within 24 hours. 

The parts are hot swapable. We just get a part in the mail, and we are good to go. You literally walk in, pull one out, and put a new one in, then the thing is running again.

The scalability is great. We just scaled up. We just bought the additional hard drive array for it, and we love it.

I don't think we are even utilizing 50 percent of the all-flash. We intentionally bought that anticipating growth.

Nimble is scalable and modular enough that you can take whatever solutions that you had in the past, pull those all together, and put them into a Nimble. It does all the things that we did before in a single package.

The technical support is awesome. They are actually monitoring the device. When we have had a hard drive failure, we have found that we come into work, and they are notifying us that a hard drive failed overnight. We haven't even had a chance to look at it yet.

The former CIO hadn't upgraded anything in almost 20 years. Everything that we had was completely outdated. We wanted to move to a more efficient solution for our on-premise stuff. We were also looking into things with the cloud, but that doesn't have a lot to do with Nimble, per se. We just needed to modernize.

We had all on-premise bare metal servers. We got rid of it four years ago, when they were still doing their backups to tape. This is why when we went to the Nimble. We cut our use of space down to about 25 percent.

Our other systems administrator dealt with the integration of the product.

I think we used an integrator and a consultant. They were on campus for about five days, helping us integrate everything and move everything over.

For education, ROI is pretty hard to determine. However, that was part of the finance portion. Our chief financial officer sat down and did an ROI on it and came to the same conclusion that we did: Nimble is the right choice for us.

We are paying for the licensing yearly.

We had Dell EMC, Nimble, and 3PAR come out. Our partner is Logicalis, and they set up all these interviews for us. We interviewed them one at a time. With our partner, we came to the decision that Nimble was the right choice for us.

There is nothing like it that we can buy that even comes close to this product. We looked at five different products, then we decided to go with Nimble. It is hands down the best device that was available to us.

I would definitely point a colleague toward the Nimble product. Most of my peers are also at universities, and the product fits perfectly into what we are trying to do. As another administrator at another university, it will be key to what they are doing.

It has met all of our needs. We haven't had any issues.

They have been consistently innovating stuff and seeing it before we even think of the possible outcomes. We are consistently shocked by what is coming out.

We do HIPAA compliance as a university. Part of that compliance has to do with how we back up employee files, which we do on the cloud, but we don't use the Nimble for that. 

InfoSight. It's AI for the data center. It's very easy. It does a lot of the work for the customer. That is why HPE bought InfoSight, so they could deploy it across all their other platforms as well. It's a big game-changer. It's one of the easiest things to talk about when you're working with a customer. Customers don't want to do a whole lot of troubleshooting themselves, and with InfoSight and the whole system, it helps to deal with all these issues.

From what I've seen personally, customers that have Nimble don't really switch away from it. When newer versions come out, they usually have everything in terms of all the support and all the additional components that might be needed to help.

With the newest models, you're getting decompression and dedupe on some of the entry-level models, and this fixes a lot of issues for customers. Therefore, I am not hearing anything at this point. They just released the newest version, and so far, it's going well.

It's stable. 

It is a scalable product. They just released Gen 5 a couple weeks ago, and there's a lot of ability, depending on the need. 

They have very good, high-level support. You deal with Level 3 technicians, so that is a key takeaway. Customers don't want to be triaged, jump from here to there, and be in the line for X amount of time. They want things done, and they want them done now. With Nimble, in my experience with it, this is where they has been beneficial.

For the Nimble product line, support is very strong. There is a lot of different information, but you get a lot of support with Nimble, and Level 3 technical support is a huge benefit for customers. Especially knowing that you receive it right off the bat, as opposed to going through all the stages. Support, coupled with the InfoSight, triages a lot of their issues.

I did not set it up myself, but based on conversations with some of our solution architects, it seems like it's a straightforward setup: out-of-the-box and easy to deploy.

I have had a lot of personal success with it. Our organization has had a lot of success with it. It has a very straightforward presentation. It does the job for a lot of customers, and it's a great enterprise solution for many of them.