HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

1. Simplified storage administration

A dedicated storage administrator is no longer needed. All of our engineers have attended the one-day training and has the knowledge how to handle the Storage Systems. With our former SAN systems we had to have an external contractor doing part time administration for us due to the complexity. Now we can easily handle the Storage systems ourselves.

2. Very efficient adaptive flash technology

Even without having hundreds of rotating disks like we had in our former SAN system or having to buy an All-flash Storage, we get predictable and low latency numbers for all of our Storage Systems.

3. Simple snapshot management

Managing Snapshots through Volume collections and Protection Plans it’s easy to make sure new volumes get the appropriate replication and snapshot plan applied, which is easy to maintain and change for all volumes. The overview of used storage for snapshots and the ease of use when cloning a snapshot is remarkable compared to legacy Storage products.

4. Central monitoring and health check via the Nimble InfoSight

The InfoSight portal gives us an overall overview of all our Storage Systems and their volumes, snapshots and protection. InfoSight 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. This helps us a lot avoiding anything from volume protection configuration mishaps to prediction on storage outage.

Increased administrative simplicity and predictable performance.

• Improved snapshot overview in array management GUI.
• Possibility to apply centralized policies across multiple systems.

Close to a year. In total we're running about ten systems.

One uptime related firmware bug, which was possible to work around and fixed in a later release.

No, not so far.

We rate the support as very knowledgeable in the product platform.

Yes, the switch was made to gain a less complex design with regards to setup and administration.

The initial setup was very simple and after one day of education all tech 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 as NetApp and HPE, as well as up-comers like Pure Storage, Violin, SolidFire, Microsoft Storage Server and others.

Embrace simplicity – no more in-house deployed admin tools or tricky CLI GUI’s, just a simple and understandable web interface.

Depending on which product platform you are about to replace – you will either just gain a far better and predictable performance or 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.

Easy to configure and view information of the system's health.

We do not need a dedicated staff member to handle the system we deploy. A regular infrastructure person that attends the Nimble training course will be able to handle the system.

Less manpower overhead to manage the storage.

Scalability, see below.

The company has been using Nimble Storage for three years.

We haven't had any issues.

We're not able to increase space on a small scale, each increase is pretty big.

Good and responsive.

Simple, it can be setup and ready to use within the same business day of delivery.

Pricing is decent.

It depends on your infrastructure specialist, the very technically advanced specialists will prefer something that is not so user friendly. They would prefer more configuration options where only people with the technical know-how will be able to look after the system. Nimble is very easy to work with. Simple technical skilled personnel will be able to handle the system.

• Hybird configuration
• SSD Cache

These features keep the cost per IO and Gig low while giving very good performance. We have multiple database servers on the SAN that require low latency for optimal performance. This configuration allows us to run the database without over allocating memory to them.

Eliminated all IO bottlenecks, reduced from 6 SANs to 1.

Admin interface can be slow.

Two years.

No problems.

No issues scaling.

Support is great, they understand that they can’t live in a bubble. They understand virtualization and other applications.

Yes, Dell EqualLogic. Cost per IO and Gig. Stability.

Very straightforward, up in running and in testing first day.

It is straightforward, no hidden costs.

Yes, Dell, EMC, Hitachi, NetApp, Pure Storage.

If you test it yourself, it is clear how it just beats every other product hands down.

• Data Protection is superb with downstream DR Nimble arrays.
• Confidence in support and not being afraid to keep up to date.

• Simplicity, ease of upgrade of software (no downtime)
• Performance Integration with Commvault
• InfoSight reporting
• Support – World Class
• The Web GUI interface is easy to use and self-explanatory. From the Web GUI you can register the array plugin to vCenter and from within the VMWare Client and the Web Client you have array integration to allow you to Clone Snapshots and present the clone to the ESXi hosts in a couple of mouse clicks. This feature allows VM power users with the appropriate permissions (set in vCenter) to Clone, Snapshot, Expand, delete and even change the Nimble Protection (Snapshot) schedule without needing array logon credentials or needing to go onto the array Web GUI. Commvault recognizes the Nimble arrays through it’s API so we can trigger app consistent snapshots for various products like MS SQL, Oracle, My SQL,Exchange …. The list is expansive. Nimble do provide Exchange and MS SQL out of the box also. There is also a Nimble Connection Manager for VMware (NCM) that automatically set the Path Selection Policy optimized for VMware ESXi/Nimble performance.

• Web GUI should be HTML5.
• Use smaller form factor disk to provide more spindles. Streaming Backup I/O overnight would dent performance if we were a 24*7 business. Most of our workload is 07:30 -18:30.

No.

No, but the SSD cache could do with increasing on some of our system. That’s a financial (Bean Counter) decision.

The best support ever. They will even assist if the problem lies with Hyper-V, VMware and networking. This is why I don’t think you can go wrong with Nimble!

• NetApp, EMC, Dell EqualLogic.
• NetApp relies on lots of disk and was a nightmare to keep up to date. Updating was a major project when it happened.
• NetApp? To complicated and the extras like snap manager for Exchange very expensive. The others? Not much experience of EMC or EqualLogic.

Really simple.Nimble asks you various questions about IP addresses and then you get a pre-installation checklist. If you didn’t have a clue they’d guide you on the phone initially and then do a WebEx session to get you there. Simple.

Competitive. No licensing. Since everything is included.

Tintri

They have All Flash arrays if people are concerned about Hybrid performance.

The support is the major factor in choosing Nimble and the performance has been great in all our Mix Load environments.

Snapshotting and replication.

These features provide a good resilience for business continuity and disaster recovery, by enabling us to effectively store data away from our primary site and giving us the ability to restore data relatively quickly.

Ability to replicate data offsite for DR protection in an easy and automated fashion.

Easier retrieval of snapshotted data and more granular control is desired.

This is in comparison to something like Veeam or MS shadow copy, where restoration of files is easier in their respective proprietary GUIs.

Snapshotting with Nimble can be very granular, but the restoration from a snapshot is not as easy as restoring with other systems.

3 years.

No issues.

No issues.

9/10

Yes, switched for scalability and cost effectiveness of data storage/protection.

Get what you pay for, in-line pricing with other vendors.

Evaluate with Nimble, they are very helpful and able to answer queries about data storage requirements. No hard sell.

InfoSight is such a wonderful tool and given us insight we’ve never had into our storage environment.

The ‘insight’ into our equipment is fantastic. And their support is old-school, which means that they do an awesome job at being proactive.

InfoSight is such a wonderful tool and given us insight we’ve never had into our storage environment.

Being able to forecast growth and analysis at this level is not possible on our NetApp without a significant investment.

We can forecast when we need to invest in additional storage instead of the former, very manual effort.

We have had excellent support experience with their techs and get proactive notifications of issues instead of us having to monitor the solution.

There have been a couple of instances where we discovered previously unreported bugs.

One year.

No problems.

No problems.

Excellent support.

We used NetApp before, Nimble was a better architecture for us and we receive better support than with the NetApp support team

Straighforward setup.

If you have a logo they want, they get very aggressive with pricing to have that marketing collateral.

NetApp.

You will be very impressed – we didn’t know we had a latency issue on our email system until we were in the process of putting it into production. It was great that the Nimble could provide us an instant benefit.

Flexible scaling for future-proof and Nimble InfoSight, easy and clear to use reporting portal.

• Centralize storage location for data and virtualized servers.
• Minimum experiences with downtime.
• Data compression ratio seems reasonable comparing to claims.

Pricing.

4-5 years.

Generally speaking, no. However, just yesterday we experienced a volume failure, took down an essential production server. Still in the middle of investigation, will log a case with Nimble soon.

We are currently in the stage of planning to scale up, from what we were promised it should be trouble free.

I’ve yet dealt with technical support which is a good sign. The rep from Nimble and Engineers were helpful when I had question in regards of our scaling up project.

Yes, the decision was made before I joined the company, however, I believe it was due to pricing and the shift of our strategy.

Seems to be competitive and reasonable, however, with industry shifting focus onto cloud platform, many small-midsize businesses are limited to what we are offered.

We previously had Dell EqualLogic It was considered when it’s time for renewal.

Keep future needs in mind. Data might grow at a rate that surprises you.

Ease of use with the hardware and software GUI. Easy firmware upgrades. The performance for the price is extremely valuable.

The hardware is simplistic. The physical wiring of the controllers, upgrading controllers, and adding expansion shelves or cache. The software GUI lays everything out nice and clean. You are able to intuitively find what you need to accomplish in few clicks. The reporting is excellent. The firmware upgrades are easy. Just click and sit back and relax. They are non-invasive and take minimal time. The performance is on par with some of the other solutions that cost much more.

We are heavily reliant on SQL databases. Because of the performance out of the array, we are not storage bottlenecked. The price makes the value extremely appealing.

I used to have some gripes with how the GUI worked such as folder organization but the developers listened and released that in a new firmware version. I do want close to real time performance metrics in InfoSight.

Over 2 years.

The product has been extremely stable for us.

We have scaled up and out at our primary datacenter with no issues.

One of the best support experiences out there.

Yes and because of the performance and abilities of the array such as encryption without purchasing new hardware.

It was easy.

There are no hidden costs, but go for InfoSight.

I inherited this vendor in my environment but it has proven to be a worthy vendor and no plans to change.

• Support, it is superb!
• InfoSight, especially VM Vision.
• Easy of setup and management, no need for storage experts.
• Performance, just delivers on all that it promises.
• Maintenance price is fixed for 5 years.

We do not need to employ storage specialists to set up and manage our storage.

InfoSight gives us in-depth knowledge to ensure our storage and associated systems are performing well, which is more than we could even get from previous storage systems.

Support for near synchronous replication.

Currently the smallest snapshot window is 15 minutes, that means if we replicate data from one array to another array we will be up to 15 minutes out of date, this is the RPO.

We have a small number of systems that need to be replicated in such a way that we do not lose any data if we need to fail-over to the replica on the second SAN, or at least it should be only seconds behind.

Some SANs, like NetApp, have a synchronous replication feature, so when data is written to SAN1 a copy is sent to SAN2, only when this has been written successfully at SAN2 does the data on SAN1 get flagged as written. This means both SANs are in-step.

This is great if you have the SANs locally and have a fast connection, but if they are in different data centres and the WAN link is slow you get latency issues while the data is written and acknowledged by SAN2.

When I talk about near synchronous replication I am thinking of how DoubleTake from Vision Solutions works, I have been using this for over 15 years to do this type of replication.

This works by copying the block of data on SAN1 directly to the local volume, but taking a copy and putting it into a buffer. This means latency at SAN1 is not compromised.

The copied block is then sent across the WAN to the second SAN, where it is written and acknowledged back to the DoubleTake system on SAN1. Once the acknowledgement is back the local copy on SAN1 is deleted.

This means if any latency on the WAN does not impact the speed of storage on SAN1, although the data on SAN2 could be a little bit behind, but in most cases we are talking seconds at the mots, and once any congestion on then WAN link has gone the replication is nearly as fast as a pure synchronous system will achieve, so for most purposes it is as close to real-time as required.

If the WAN goes down, or you need to take SAN2 off-line for any reason, the only impact on SAN1 is the buffer grows with data to be replicated, and once the WAN or SAN2 is back on line this is flushed to SAN2 as fast as the WAN can transfer the data.

You need a ‘re-synch’ feature in case the volume on SAN2 is corrupted, this checks the CRC on the data blocks between the two systems and re-transmits any blocks that do not match.

• AFA 5000 - 5 months
• CS260 - 3 years
• CS210 - 4.5 years

No, none at all.

The CS210 is very limited and could not be expanded despite having spare slot’s for drives. But we were able to scale-out two of these to create a larger single unit.

But we have first generation hardware that cannot be upgraded unlike newer systems.

Amazing. Nothing is too much trouble, and they have a wealth of information they can access to help you.

• We had Hitachi AMS2100 SANs.
• The CS210 reduced the required rack size from 12 U to 3 U for more than double the performance.
• Price was competitive with Hitachi’s and other solutions providing similar performance, when including all licences and maintenance over a 3 years period.
• Much easier to set up and manage than all our previous SANs.
• Improved monitoring, and no extra costs for providing this.

Biggest problem was fitting the arrays into the racks – need to bend the rails (shoe or hammer required). Fixed in the latest models.

Took less than 30 minutes to get up and running and connected to our servers.

Simple – one price for the equipment, one price for the support and maintenance (fixed for 5 years), any updates and improvements and all licences included.

Looked at options from Hitachi, EMC, NetApp and HP.

Make full use of their Pre-Sales engineers, make them your best friend, they will stay with you for the journey and can assist you get the best out of the equipment.

Don’t be frightened of asking Support for help, if you authorise full data collection they can look at a wealth of information on your behalf covering more than the actual storage elements.

Ratings:

• AFA 5000 - 10/10
• CS260 - 9/10 - Only because the AFA is better as it has in-line de-duplication.
• CS210 - 7/10 - Limited expansion without adding further trays.

Performance, snapshot and replication capability. It’s also nice that they continue to add features at no cost through software updates. Their online portal InfoSight is helpful for tracking assets, health, utilization and other metrics.

Performance – our arrays can handle varying workloads effectively. Snapshot and replication capability – have allowed us to simplify and improve our backup and recovery capabilities. Their online portal InfoSight is helpful for tracking assets, health, utilization and other metrics. It’s also nice that they continue to add features at no cost through software updates.

We shifted from tape based backups to snapshot and replication based backups. That improved backup performance, restore time, reliability and reduced manual effort on managing the backups.

It would be good to have a built in way to index snapshots so that we’d be able to granularly see what files were in a snapshot and restore at a file level. We’re using an add on product from Commvault to achieve this.

4 years.

No.

No. The solutions are very scalable. There are multiple ways to upgrade and scale – adding storage shelves, upgrading flash, upgrading processing etc.

Excellent. Proactive alerting. Responsive phone support unlike many other companies. Our local field rep is always willing to help.

Many different SANs.

Quick to set up and configure.

Reasonable pricing compared to other SAN vendors.

EMC, IBM, NetApp.

Give it a try with a POC. This is one of the rare vendors that do what they say they will. Their sales team is very easy to work with.