HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

The biggest thing from when they have replaced the old storage is that they have not had to touch it. That once it is set up it, it dynamically understands what data is being stored on it and where to store it, because they have got a flash array at the front, then obviously the standard style of storage at the back. There was not a lot of configuration needed to make it understand what their business was about and how it worked. It was just a big plus that once it was in, they more or less could forget about it.

It allowed them to concentrate on other projects that were obviously important for growing their business rather than having to worry about managing the storage, which is what they used to do with all their old storage.

Before HPE bought Nimble, we had a couple of customers that use it quite extensively, not just for storage of data, but also as their backup solution as well. So, we have found the advantage of it is the easy, rapid setup, but also that it is very easy to manage. 

Their remote management and understanding when things are starting to go wrong and their ability to fix them before the customer even knows, this has been a big positive when a customer makes the decision to go with Nimble.

The backup solution that they are using now probably has not been deduped. I think this is probably sort of one area that the customer is a little bit concerned about. It is a timing issue for them, though it is still working at the moment. It is just not giving them enough header space that they thought they would have because the dedupe does not seem to be working as well as it could. So, it is something that needs to be reviewed and to make sure the customer has not clicked a certain feature. 

I know for a fact that once they get in touch with HPE or Nimble, they will obviously look at the box remotely, see where there are potentially fine tunings, and if it is just a question of the customer having time to allow them to come online and review it, hopefully it will get solved.

Apart from that, everything else has been positive.

The occasional disk here and there goes. However, they turn up and swap the disk before you even know it. So, stability has been very good in that sense.

We have added a couple of shelves over the years to the product already. We still have capacity to add one more shelf to it, but obviously the product changes and develops all the time and allows the expansion, then you still have the ability to pull out the main engines and replace the controller cards on the actual box itself. You know you have a growth area forward in the product. It is not as if you have to throw it away and start again, when you hit the capacity. That was another advantage, it was easy to upgrade.

I can only really sort of comment when it was Nimble, because obviously HPE has only owned them for a few months now. From both a pre-sales and post-sales, I have always found them really good. They are very professional, know their products, know what they do, and very informative in terms of keeping the customer updated. For me, it is always just been a positive, which would be why I would always recommend them on to other clients, because of that.

Our customers have been looking at 3PAR, but:

• It is too expensive.
• It was not automated enough, in the way that Nimble is.

It is sort of one of those decisions that it is quite easy to make in terms of the Nimble solution for money for storage size regarding which is more cost effective. Also, the ability to set it up and more or less leave it alone to run itself. It is a big positive. 

It's not that expensive and it really brings the latency down; that was the promise from their end and it really did.

Since we are using virtual desktop environments, we had to deal with boot storms and we solved this issue with Nimble.

For me, this product has everything I need in there. What could be improved is performance monitoring, i.e., if it can get even better than what it is now, I will be happy. For example, there should be an exact drilling down to any workload/any virtual machine/any identified issue. So, if an issue appears and there is latency, there could be a faster or easier way to know what the reason is and how we can resolve it with Nimble.

15 months

no issues

The product is very stable.

We are considering to scale it. We did consider it once and we might consider in the future as well. I had the impression that we can easily scale it.

very good

very good

We were using a different solution. I was visiting a specific software house conference (the software that we were using then), they had Nimble there and I was really interested; I asked them questions and then, eventually, it turned out into a project.

While selecting a vendor, I want to be sure that we are getting good value for money and having good performance; for me, that's the main priority.

The setup was very easy, it was a matter of a couple of hours.

the vendor came here at the very beginning and set all up

I looked at the traditional products out there and did a comparison with Nimble as well. For example, we compared EMC Storage with NimbLe and I also did consider SimpliVity, at the time but for this specific workload, it turned out that Nimble had the best approach.

Absolutely, try it out. For me, it was very easy because Nimble offered us to try and buy. They just came, set up the box, and I had a whole month's time to try it; it worked perfectly. For me, it was really easy.

It delivers High IOPS, but more important, low latency. This is the most important part for our usage.

• VMware integration, why is pretty self-explanatory.
• Nimble offers better VMware integration then EMC does.
• Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environment.
• Fibre Channel support

Nimble offers InfoSight, which in turn offers VMVision. This is a terrific feature. You can immediately see which VM causes the highest IOPS and which has the most latency. The downside of this feature is that you can only see it on InfoSight and the data is always a few hours old. It would be awesome if this was in the dashboard of the Nimble and shown as live data.

Also, Nimble requires its DNS to work in order to interface with VMware vCenter is a little thorn in my eye, but I am being nitpicky here.

No issues.

No issues.

Our storage solutions are stable and scalable.

The valuable features include encryption of data, hybrid performance, firmware updates, and overall simplicity.

The amount of firmware updates released seem excessive.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

The level of technical support is excellent. We are always able to speak to an intelligent engineer 24/7/365.

We used EMC Celerra. We switched due to the complexity of volume management and performance.

The initial setup was straightforward once the decision of connectivity is made.

It is expensive, but it is worth the “uptime”.

We evaluated other NetApp, EMC, and DELL EQL

Prepare your network properly if using the iSCSI protocol.

All features.

• Predictive performance
• 1/4 of a data center footprint than traditional SAN
• Predictive and flexible capacity/performance scaling
• Box license, unlimited snapshots/replications
• Better overview/monitoring/transparency in infrastructure
• Interoperability with other infrastructure elements

Further improvements on existing features, always.

Approximately one year.

No.

No.

Nimble technical support is only level 3, best support experienced compared to any other SAN platforms.

Previously used EMC VPLEX, VNX , XtremIO , IBM DS8800, and Storwize.

We switched because traditional SAN solutions are outdated and inefficient.

Very easy to set up, approximately 10 mins per system.

I strongly recommend everybody switching from traditional capacity-licensing models, to Box-license.

HPE 3PAR, Tintri, EMC VNX, and EMC XtremIO.

Try it.

It's definitely more of an appliance than a storage array in that sense. So from a "set it and forget it" mentality, it definitely is there.

Definitely ease-of-use. I've experienced many different arrays out there and Nimble is definitely there. The analytic side is very helpful on their info site. Integration with VMware is easy. There are not any additional appliance plug-ins to load beyond the basics. It works well.

I would like to see integration with OneView, at least for reporting or some sort of monitoring. Basic stuff like that would be nice. I can't think of any area that is lacking for what we use it for.

It is very stable.

I have used technical support. It is excellent. The best.

We have a slew of HPE products. Since we were a partner with Nimble prior to the acquisition, it was natural for us to use and sell their products.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very straightforward.

We only evaluated HPE. Our previous experience has a bearing on which vendor we choose. In terms of Nimble, I did a thorough technical evaluation and had discussions with the vendor and with Nimble themselves at the time. My questions were answered.

Try it. They have a VSA, so they have a virtual appliance. I don't know what the options are for testing it that way, but if there is an option to do a PoC, then give it a shot.

InfoSight, for sure, has been the best feature so far.

I really would like to see synchronous replication. This is something that when we have multiple arrays in our environment and being able to do something like a zero RPO. Being a law firm, we really want our data to be protected all the time. Although, we are really rocking the Nimble snapshots and you'll hear them talk about the maximum snapshots that you can have; there's no performance impact and it's just really cool to have that kind of data protection. We're utilizing it but getting further, so as to get the knob all the way down to zero RPO, that would be a really cool feature. I hear that they're working on it.

It has been incredibly stable. It has been so stable that when I started with the Nimble acquisition/purchase process for us, I was the senior storage engineer. However, after implementing Nimble Storage, I did a little bit of the setup, wrote the APIs for us to be able to work with it and then, I had nothing to do. So at the end of the year, when we're supposed to do our employer reviews and self-evaluations, I wrote this whole thing about why you don't need me anymore. Just told them, "Look, congratulations. You no longer need a dedicated storage engineer. Do what you want with that." They said, "Sure. We're going to promote you to become the senior manager of the network and infrastructure team." It's kind of a cool story, it is true.

We've already added another shelf just because we saw another need coming up. It was just so simple, i.e., literally plug and play and very laid back.

I've not worked with HPE support, only with Nimble support, which is right now separate and hopefully, it will stay that way.

Every time that I've worked with Nimble, I've had an absolutely excellent experience. Whether it be the automated, "Hey, we have solved this and already closed this ticket for you"; those are invaluable, i.e., 85% of the tickets are being closed just from InfoSight.

I'll give you an example where I saw the support really step-up, which was when we set up our DR solution. We're actually using DR from their Nimble Storage but it's not under our control. There's a little bit of a conversation that needs to happen and for whatever reason, that conversation wasn't working perfectly and I opened a ticket with Nimble Storage. That was the last thing I did. From then on, the technician who was working and looking at the auto-sups that were coming in. He was working with the other guy saying, "Okay, this is exactly what you need to fix or modify on your side. Let's try it again." I'm checking my email and then they're like, "Okay, we got it." That was it. It was literally a zero-touch fix for me.

We were using a different company before. There are actually several reasons why we decided to look at other vendors. One of which was that we had an unexpected outage with our older storage system for about 56 hours and it was significant enough that even though, we usually were loyal to that company we said, "Maybe we should start talking to other people." We brought in Nimble Storage as well as about three or four other vendors and we did a little bit of bake-off. We had conversations with the teams, asked for references and really when we started asking to put some of our workloads onto their appliance, that's when it really made a difference for us.

They gave us so many options of what we wanted to do. What had happened was because of the company that they were replacing, was one of those big iron-type companies, so they really wanted to just have a picture with their appliance next to ours. Nimble Storage came out and they racked everything for me; they plugged it in, they did all the setup and said, "Here it is. Here's your password. Go ahead and start carving out some volumes." Within probably an hour, I already had my first volumes already mapped and masked to the posts, all ready to go.

We do actually have a certain set of criteria that we use and it's a weighted criteria set. One of the top criteria, for us, is the relationship that you have with the vendor because everybody hopes that things are going to go right, but the real question is when things don't go right, is your team going to stand beside you? I have worked with the sales team and have said, "Hey guys! Is this pillow talk or is this an after-the-sale conversation? Are you still going to stand by me?" This is me, the customer, talking to the vendor.

They stood by me, more than did prior to the purchase. I get constant updates from them checking in, "Hey, do you want to talk about whatever?" I always feel well-prepared. We never had an incident where I really had to hit that red button, but I am 100% confident that if I did, then they would be standing there right probably in the room with me, making sure that I've got everything I need to get through this situation. This is a huge thing, i.e., being right there for us, which is reliability from an array perspective. It has got to have at least 5 nine's and that's just starting the conversation. We absolutely need the critical uptime and from there, there's also the price-point. For us, it's the vendor relationship, product reliability, and then, probably, the price-point while selecting a vendor.

It provides good performance, ease of use and ease of administration. The usage statistics, the cloud and their info site are all very good.

It's easier to administer than other storage solutions so that gives us agility to implement storage services.

Let's see, well you already have the old flash, I felt that was missing but, I don't know. It's a very good solution but the price is not the best, probably better pricing would be good but yes, it's a good solution.

We didn't encounter any issues with stability. It's good, very stable.

I haven't had the need to scale it, but it has good scalability.

Now that I remember I didn't use the technical support.

This was a new project where we needed a storage solution and we evaluated Nimble among others and we decided to go with Nimble.

I wasn't involved in the initial set up.

We evaluated some others but I'd rather not say which vendors. The features of the product, stability, performance, support and cost are important to us.

Try the solution, it's pretty straightforward to use and very easy to manage.