HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• 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.

The most valuable features are snapshot & replication. The snapshot is straightforward in terms of how you can easily manage your backup schedule based on your RPO & RTO. You can instantly recover your data in a minute when you need it from a specific point in time. The replication was very reliable and efficient for our customers because you can just replicate your data with a minimum 2 Mb bandwidth.

You know, here in the Philippines, internet bandwidth is one of the most critical concerns and with Nimble, bandwidth wasn't an issue for you to have a reliable disaster recovery setup (DR site) and amazingly, Nimble doesn't charge you any additional license cost no matter how big the data that you need to replicate.

• Upgraded models that doubles the capacity and performance

Just continue the updates of technology features; I expect there will be more updates in capacity and IOPS as models upgrade in the future.

I have used it for about two years; from the CS200 series and the CS700 series to the new models, which are the CS1000-CS7000 series.

So far, based on my experience in deploying Nimble in different industries such as telcos, manufacturing, retail, hotel & casino, etc., I haven't encountered any major issues in terms of stability because all of the components were fully redundant and aside from that, Nimble has a monitoring system, or what they call InfoSight, which gives you proactive support. The product appliance will send a heartbeat every five minutes to InfoSight just to make sure that all software and hardware components are working properly and 100% up and running.

We have not encountered any scalability issues; this was really a scale to fit. I can just scale up if I need to by upgrading specific components such as CPU, SSD & HDD. I can also scale out by combining different Nimble array models to have flexible adjustment if certain apps need more resources.

Technical support is 10/10. Aside from InfoSight, they have technical support on standby 24/7 when you need it. In terms of hardware replacement, they always make sure that they meet what is expected from the SLA.

I previously used a different solution, and I switched to Nimble because of its cost effectiveness, its ease of use and it is very manageable. Nimble simplified everything for me.

Initial setup was very straightforward. In fact, you can set up the product in just 30 minutes, as long as everything is ready; the checklist, etc.

Pricing is very competitive compared to other solutions. All the features are bundled in the product without any additional cost.

There are no licensing costs.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated other options such as EMC, HPE, IBM, etc. Among those brands, for me, Nimble was the most cost effective and simplified.

Please evaluate and review other solutions and from that, you can simply compare and experience the advantages of Nimble storage in terms of features, performance, cost effectiveness, reliability, and efficiency.

The performance and simplicity are the most valuable features. We originally moved from NetApp, which in our opinion was an extremely complicated system to learn. It was not intuitive at all, whereas everything about Nimble Storage is intuitive, hence their name. All their online documentation is easy to read and easy to follow. All their online sales information is transparent and usually done by a third party instead of by themselves. As far as the performance, they're able to get much better performance with normal spinning disks. We've always had spinning disks in our storage solutions, but they're able to get better performance out of the typical spinning disk, just by the way they've written their software on the back-end. Then for solid-state drives, they can get better performance through read operations through the data.

One of the reasons why we had to move away from our old storage solutions was that we started to use virtual workstations. That's a solution that we wanted to move forward and we just didn't have the performance to do that with our NetApp solution. That has definitely transformed our business as far as being able to centralize all our workstations into one solution. We can also better leverage disaster recovery, because all our workstations will replicate over to our disaster recovery location.

They only use block-level storage and with NetApp, we were able to use file-level storage. That means we could leverage NFS or we could leverage SIFS and we could actually host a file server on the storage solution itself. We could do that with our NetApp solution. Right now, they only use block-level solutions, so you can only use iSCSI.

I have used this solution for almost two and half years.

I have not had stability issues with Nimble Storage.

We haven't had to scale out yet, but we would have zero issues if we needed to. They have plenty of offerings for us to do that.

I'd give technical support 5/5. When I call, I get somebody on the phone immediately. I just have to press one number to go to technical support and I immediately have somebody on the phone.

Setup was very straightforward. That was one of the things we liked about it most.

I recommend the product because of the licensing and pricing. It seems like they are flexible regarding pricing in compared to other vendors. There is really is no licensing; it's all in one. It all comes in one bundle.

We evaluated NetApp, which is our previous solution, and then we also evaluated Pure Storage.

My advice would be to use it. Just make sure whether you need to go with an all solid-state drive solution or whether you can use their hybrid solution, because there's going to be a big price difference.

The single feature that is valuable is InfoSight and the visibility it gives us for our capacity planning.

It has allowed us to enhance the recovery and deployment of our infrastructure.

It would be beneficial for Nimble to have an NVVM and/or an all-flash solution.

Currently Nimble’s All Flash solution is SSD disk based. Nimble should investigate in having their All Flash Solution with NVM Ram (similar to HP) or memory storage similar to Violin Storage.

I have used Nimble Storage for four years.

We have not had issues with stability.

The issue with scalability is that I can’t expand to more than six arrays with one controller.

I give technical support 4.5/5.

The previous solution was very complex.

I would like to suggest a price reduction seeing that there are similar products in the market. The licensing should not be touched.

We looked at HPE 3PAR and Dell EMC.

If you don’t have a storage team, this product is right for you.

Remote replication for disaster recovery is the primary use of the array. As we get further along in our implementation and are more familiar with the product, we intend to use the cloning features to create development and test environments.

In the past, our virtual servers had been deployed to on-board storage. By using an array, we are able to more easily manage and increase our storage capacities. In the future, we intend to use zero-copy cloning to reduce the time to deploy test environments.

So far, the only area I have noticed that requires improvement is the ability to console directly to the device. The device is supplied with a special adapter that requires a female-to-female serial cable. If standard cables (preferably USB) cannot be used, then complete solutions should be provided with the device.

We have been using the storage array in production for about six months. We are in the process of migrating all our virtual servers to the array and configuring replication to the DR site.

We have not encountered any no stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support has been fantastic. Questions have been answered accurately and in a timely manner.

At one point, we used NetApp. We found it expensive, especially with the storage overhead required. The Nimble product was significantly less expensive and management was simpler.

We used sub-contractors for the initial setup but saw that the process was relatively simple. As with all technologies, there are many different ways of configuring the devices depending on intended usage. We found that we changed some things as we progressed through the implementation. Overall, the implementation has been relatively painless.

We did not evaluate alternatives.

If you have the budget; go for it. As with any storage, don't under-buy, you'll always need more.

• 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.

• Easy-to-implement snapshot technology
• Replication included with no need for additional licensing

In addition to exceptional performance and reliability, it covers, "for free", all the needs our primary backup system cannot provide due to costly licensing.

The product is near perfect, but there is always room for further development; maybe, more automation in snapshot management.

I have used Nimble Storage for about three years.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

We had multiple storage solutions that simply got to their EOL.

Setup was relatively simple, even with the very first Bonjour installer.

Our last purchase took place three years ago. I cannot advise on today's market.

I joined the company after the decision has been made. An external IT provider assisted with making this decision.

Nimble was pretty unique at the time with their new CASL architecture. There are many more products built on the same principles today on the market. So, as usual, shop around before making this strategic decision.

The built-in performance profiles have made tweaking settings for different uses (SQL log files, SQL data files, VMware datastores, etc.) extremely simple. The built-in profiles are more than enough for most implementations, and if you need to create a custom performance profile, the process is simple and well documented. The analytics available via Infosight (The online Nimble support portal) are extremely well written and useful too. In particular, I find the analytics extremely useful when tracking down causes of latency that occasionally crop up and affect processing.

The Nimble SANs, as part of an overall move from standalone servers to a combined virtual infrastructure, have allowed my client to be much more responsive to their clients. The client is a SaaS provider that does large analysis/predictive modeling for the retail market. The previous hardware setup had database processes running for 14 hours or more, creating long turn around times for users. The new servers, running on the faster Nimble storage, allowed processing times of two hours or less to be achieved, allowing for faster results, as well as the ability to process more datasets concurrently, servicing more customers.

While I was not present for the sizing discussions, I believe there was some lack of discovery in selecting the model and features for my client. 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. Certainly not the end of the world, and it can be fixed with an upgrade, but it was somewhat frustrating for my clients. I suspect estimations were used as to what the expected load would be, without a full understanding of the data processing being performed.

I originally installed one of these SANs for a customer just over three years ago. Since then, two additional SANs (same model, features and capacity, have since been added).

Deployment was great. The web configuration was extremely easy (and has gotten easier with every major release). Network configuration, utilizing Juniper QFX 5100 10gb switches, was simple too. All Nimble required was jumbo frames and enough network ports of each speed, 1gb and 10gb, for data and management.

The initial SAN that I installed has been extremely stable. The second of the three SANs has had occasional issues with a controller crashing, eventually leading to replacement of one of the controller heads. Failover was seamless each time it happened though, and we were able to keep working with no loss in performance (one of the few advantages of an active/passive array). Support replaced the faulty controller after appropriate testing and troubleshooting, and the problem hasn't recurred.

Yes and no. The SAN chosen was not ideal for the workload found, but growing in breadth, expanding the load across multiple arrays (with and without Group configuration) was very simple and fast, making use of the built-in replication to copy data. It is also easy to expand vertically via upgrading the controllers, though my clients chose not to do it.

Customer service with Nimble has been great every time I've dealt with them. They've always been very responsive and friendly to deal with. I definitely have appreciated the experience of dealing with Nimble Customer Service.

The technical support at Nimble is stellar. The analytics available via the Infosight web portal are extremely detailed, and yet well laid out and easy to peruse. In addition, the portal is regularly upgraded, with additional information, new views, and easier navigation. If the analytics there aren't sufficient, though, technical support is always happy to provide whatever additional help is required, including taking the time to do deep analysis of all settings in the environment (ie, Nimble and VMware settings, or Nimble and Windows settings) to ensure that things are configured optimally.

This particular environment was all standalone servers and storage previously. Decision was made to move to shared storage to support movement from standalone servers to a VMware cluster on Cisco UCS blades.

Initial setup was extremely easy. There was a Windows app for initial configuration to get the SAN configured on the network for management, and then subsequent work (volume creation, snapshot schedules, etc) is all web based and extremely easy.

I implemented these SANs personally, and did not make use of a vendor team.

It's hard to say, since it was a complete change in the datacenter going from

Licensing is dead simple and not a concern on this product, as all features are included. SANs are purposely CPU limited in a particular model, so be aware that even if you have enough flash for all your typical needs, you may hit a hard CPU limit on performance before you run out of flash. Luckily, head upgrades are easy and fully supported, allowing movement up to faster models.

I was not part of the initial hardware selection. My client was working with a VAR to choose and obtain the hardware for a data center refresh. During this process, it eventually worked out that I took over the complete data center refresh project, from design to deployment.