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HPE Nimble Storage vs IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HPE Nimble Storage
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
122
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
27th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray is 7.4%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Nimble Storage is 2.8%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Everpure FlashArray7.4%
HPE Nimble Storage2.8%
IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe1.0%
Other88.8%
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
reviewer752799 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees
Cloud management improves problem identification and future performance forecasting
My official job title is Technical Manager. I never sell the T-Series PowerEdge for Tower servers; I just sell the rack. I am familiar with OpenManage and we have been implementing it for the customer, but I am not familiar with Dell CloudIQ for infrastructure monitoring or SharePlex. I know about OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter, but we don't have a customer that is using this. I don't know much about Flash Optimized Architecture, but my customer is using both hybrid and full flash, and the customer that uses hybrid has benefited in terms of performance. HPE Nimble Storage is fairly priced compared to Dell; they are directly compatible and can compete with each other. Based on my direct experience, HPE Nimble Storage is easier to use compared to Dell, although I don't have much experience with Dell Storage. The interface and the concept of the storage structure make it easier to use. My overall experience as a reseller with HPE Nimble Storage is very good, and I would rate it 10 out of 10.
Yacine Bouakttaya - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer North Africa at Huawei
High-speed data processing has improved billing cycles but performance headroom still needs growth
In terms of improvement regarding IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe, I can compare with other competitors, especially regarding solution architecture. Data resiliency can be a concern because IBM can reach up to only four controllers, while others like Dell EMC can support up to eight controllers with better resiliency without service staff. Additionally, the SBC one benchmark is a storage performance console that stresses different storage solutions like Dell EMC and NetApp. It generates metrics of IOPS and latency, showing that the competition can have two million IOPS, significantly outperforming IBM's capabilities. As for the capability of scaling, we can see the limitations in reaching such high-performance levels.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"They have a very good support system, and the GUI is also very intuitive."
"Now with Pure Storage, our developers work a lot faster and more efficiently which has definitely improved our productivity."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"It has improved the way our organization functions by improving the resilience of our infrastructure by quite a bit."
"Manageability is its most valuable feature; it is simplified storage, as we don't have to maintain or administer it on a daily basis, which is good, and we can depend on the solution's ability to phone home and leverage the built-in support function of the product."
"Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"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."
"The replay and IOPS work well, it's user-friendly, and we're satisfied with it."
"Technical support is good."
"We don't have any extraordinary requirements; we simply require a large amount of shared storage, and HPE Nimble Storage is perfectly functional and integrates well with VMware, as do the majority of the products."
"Nimble offers solid products, are very easy to implement, and offer great performance."
"The fact that they offer free training is awesome. There are not very many vendors that do that."
"It's very stable and fast, and I am very happy with the deduplication. It saves a lot of space, which is great."
"It has totally taken away a layer of time and effort, management-wise, from two engineers to give that time back into developing more solutions. It has provided us essentially with a platform to go away and be more creative, knowing that that is stable and can do whatever we chuck at it."
"There are many valuable features of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMele I have found to meet my needs. Specifically, the maintenance cycle is a standout feature of this solution. The main component of the IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is the maintenance of the batteries, which have a predetermined and reliable four-year life cycle. This is in stark contrast to other solutions that may use spinning disks, which can fail unexpectedly, causing unwanted downtime and maintenance. Having a predictable maintenance cycle is a significant advantage and has made this solution a preferred choice for me."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is one of the leading storage systems in the world...I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten."
"The FlashCore modules support more value to the architecture due to their unique characteristics."
"Its ease of use, performance, and hardware compression is very useful feature."
"The product is a game-changer; IBM changed the game architecturally by moving computational resources into the flash media."
"The high performance and high availability improved our overall processes."
"Good performance with a user-friendly UI."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is easy to use and comes with good performance."
 

Cons

"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"We would always like to see higher performance, and lower pricing is always better."
"They need to find another way of doing data protection, RAID is not working very well."
"The product could improve by providing the capability to support NAS storage – CIFS and NFS."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"The most difficult part about Nimble was the fact that it didn't have a standard length. It had a prolonged length to standard servers, which made it slightly challenging to get it installed and we had to switch racks around."
"They are hard to understand us when we request their support. It's not a significant problem, but sometimes their first and second-tier engineers cannot solve the problem effectively and need to escalate to the third-tier engineer, who is quite worse in terms of understanding our problem."
"HPE Nimble Storage should improve its latency. It is expensive."
"We are doing a hybrid and are moving some machines to Microsoft Azure to run in hybrid mode. We are checking the availability of extra software-defined storage so that we can configure it."
"They keep talking about doing one-to-many replication. This is what we'd like to see, just to help with data replication."
"Even though the flash size on the array was doubled from Nimble's initial recommendation, the SAN still has latency issues during the largest dataset imports, due to CPU limitations on the SAN model that presales had recommended for this client."
"There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time."
"They only use block-level storage and with NetApp, we were able to use file-level storage."
"We're not satisfied with the deduplication and compression for our volumes."
"The storage system itself should have built-in capabilities for different ransomware attacks."
"IBM is currently not offering volume-based encryption or compression, while other brands or IBM's competitors are doing it."
"The solution's compression needs to be improved, as it's not the best."
"The pricing should be more competitive."
"The efficacy of the GUI in IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe could be enhanced, and it would be beneficial to include a feature that can prevent ransomware attacks."
"Other vendors have included a block and file system. IBM doesn't include a file system."
"Other vendors have included a block and file system. IBM doesn't include a file system. And yet, it's very necessary for all organizations' networks to have file systems. We have other systems for the file system, however, ideally, we would like to have one system with these features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would prefer that they lower their pricing."
"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year."
"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
"No storage device is cheap, but Pure Storage is fairly priced and offers what you pay for. You get all the licenses in the future when you purchase a license."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"I think HPE Nimble Storage is less expensive than Primera and is the best solution for Venezuela."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable for the features that it provides."
"The pricing for this product is somewhat high."
"There is a monthly fee to use the solution."
"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."
"It is cost-effective, which is important for a service provider, because you're competing with hyper-scale providers who do things at extremely large scale, who tend to kill you on price if you're not careful."
"There is a one-time price for hardware, and with the software support, everything is included, such as software upgrades. The licensing of the solution is included in the cost of the hardware and the support is an extra cost. We have purchased support on an annual basis, but you can purchase support up front for up to seven years. We usually buy five years and near the time of the expiry, we sometimes extend it."
"The solution is a little pricey compared to others on the market."
"The tool's pricing is competitive."
"The price of the FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is reasonable."
"It's a lot less costly than cloud storage. People get surprised by the cost of cloud storage, which is extremely expensive and four or five times the cost of storage on-premises. People don't realize what they're spending on storage until they start getting bills from Amazon, Microsoft, and others. This is a good way to reduce your cloud storage expenses."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing an eight."
"Compared to its competitors, IBM's offering is the most cost-effective."
"Compared to other solutions, the cost of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is reasonable, with a one-time payment of around $70,000. However, additional support is available for $25,000 for three years. The overall maintenance cost is steep."
"The solution's price is competitive."
"The solution is priced well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise43
Large Enterprise40
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...
Which would you choose - HPE Nimble Storage or HPE Primera?
HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. Th...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Nimble Storage?
Other storage companies are very expensive, similar to HPE Storage. We choose HPE based on the know-how we have, whic...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
The licensing cost for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe can be seen as a bit expensive compared to competitors. You can eith...
What needs improvement with IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
In terms of improvement regarding IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe, I can compare with other competitors, especially regardi...
What is your primary use case for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
There are many advantages that we have with IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe against, for example, IBM full flash systems an...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Nimble Storage
IBM FlashSystem 9100, FlashSystem 9100
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Ace Relocation, Atkins Nutritionals, Berkeley Research Group, Canadian International School, City of Hot Springs, Clackamas County, Corona-Norco Unified School District, Ideal Integrations, Linear Technology, P&O Maritime, Retail Apparel Group (RAG), Virtual Radiologic
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Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Nimble Storage vs. IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.