HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We are using it for our high availability cluster.

It's very stable and fast, and I am very happy with the deduplication. It saves a lot of space, which is great.

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.

We have been using this solution for four years.

It is a stable solution.

It is scalable, and we have 600 active users.

We have Lenovo SAN Storage, but it's very slow and is not recommended. The deduplication is not smooth as well. Nimble is the best solution.

The set up is very straightforward, and everything was smooth. Our cluster was managed, and we didn't have any issues.

We have never done any maintenance for the last four years, and even the power supply has been working fine. Everything has been in good condition for four years.

We don't require a license. If we used HPE InfoSight, then we would require a license, but for our needs, we don't need one.

If you want deduplication storage, HPE Nimble Storage is the solution for you, and if you want to run a unit for storage, then Nimble is the best. For deduplication, it is very nice because it dedupes every file you create. You will save storage space. I would give this solution an eight out of ten.

HPE Nimble Storage is used for data backups.

HPE Nimble Storage uses the InfoSight platform and it is useful because we can identify the faults and can analyze the performance. It has many other features. This feature is the best that I have observed from HPE Nimble Storage.

The interface of the solution is good.

Pure Storages have some option, which allows us the ability to directly download that host inventory and volume report. We can receive everything directly generated from the storage itself. We do not need to use some other web browser or something. If HPE Nimble Storage could do the same it would be a benefit.

While we're attaching the host and creating a volume. Afterward, it is a bit difficult compared to all other storage solutions. In other solutions, we can directly search for the host, but in Nimble, the drop-down is difficult.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for approximately three years.

HPE Nimble Storage is highly stable. We have not had any downtime due to failures in the three years we have used it. 

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 20 applications running on the solution.

Nimble support is different from HPE support. When comparing some other HPE products, such as Primera and 3PAR, the engineers are different. HPE Nimble Storage has all-in-one support. The L1, L2 will be one direct contact person. We don't need to wait for someone in the L1 to do any analysis. We can receive the analysis as earlier.

I would rate the support from HPE Nimble Storage a 4 out of five.

We have previously used many similar solutions, such as IBM and Pure Storage. I have found HPE Nimble Storage to be a better solution.

The installation of HPE Nimble Storage is not complex because I was one of the engineers who did the installations. We have not had many challenges while installing the HPE Nimble Storage. 

HPE Nimble Storage has a controller and we are using active and passive modes. It would be great a great benefit to have an active, active mode.

There is not a lot of maintenance. If we need to expand the solution there is no downtime required. For some other types of upgrades, there will be some downtime but it is minimal.

The price of HPE Nimble Storage is good.

To purchase the solution is a one-time purchase.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage an eight out of ten.

We used HPE Nimble Storage for several purposes. Primarily, it served as our storage solution. 

Additionally, we employed it for disk-based backups. We also had a tape system in place and HPE Nimble Storage integrated seamlessly with our HPE Synergy infrastructure. 

I appreciate its batch capabilities, the capacity is important, and the DriveTape support. They offer hybrid support, which I like.

It could be more cost-effective. For customers with budget constraints, I recommend HPE Nimble Storage. That's one of the reasons I favor it.

The performance is good, but it can depend on the specific data or database. Typically, companies using HPE Nimble Storage fall within a certain range. Overall, that's a strong aspect of the solution.

HPE Nimble Storage's predictive analytics are adequate, but not exceptional.

I have been using it for a couple of months. But it has been in my company even before I joined. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. I had some issues. 

The customer service and support are good. 

The initial setup was straightforward. When we deployed it, we used HPE Synergy for computing and HPE Nimble Storage for cloud storage. 

We also integrated a backup server into the bundle. Once everything was connected, we were able to start using it.

In general, I would rate it a nine out of ten. I would recommend using it since it is HPE product. 

It's important to first determine your priorities. When deciding to use HPE Nimble Storage, consider whether you need an all-flash solution or a hybrid option. 

They offer both types, so you can choose based on your requirements. That flexibility is a key advantage for customers.e 

We use the solution for customer data storage.

The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs.

HPE Nimble Storage should improve its latency. It is expensive.

I have been using the product since 2001.

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool's ease of deployment a nine out of ten. Its deployment took around three months to complete.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage's pricing an eight out of ten. It can be expensive, especially when considering console ports and renewals.

The tool is better than any other data storage. HPE Nimble Storage is recommended for enterprise. I would recommend it to others and rate it a seven out of ten overall.

We primarily use it for storage.

The capacity for data storage and compression is good.

I would like to see some additional features included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for the past eight months.

It was on track, but I have problems with the next servicer. For example, I have a new device and it needs to connect to Nimble. 

I do not pay for it.

I would rate HPE Nimble Storage a nine out of ten.

It's a fairly standard nimble storage array.

We use HPE Nimble Storage as our typical SAN for virtual environment storage and shared storage.

The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies.

You could argue that it would be preferable if everything were cheaper in order to save taxpayer money. While that would be nice, they are comparable to what else is available on the market and they are competitive.

We have been working with HPE Nimble Storage for 18 months.

HPE Nimble Storage is a stable product.

HPE Nimble Storage is a scalable solution.

We currently serve up to 375 users. There is also one primary administrator and two secondary administrators.

My recollection is that there was a question in the beginning, and we contacted technical support; everything was fine. Excellent.

Previously, we were using Dell EqualLogic's PS series. We have since removed that from our environment and moved to another storage platform. We switched to the other platform in late 2020. We switched to HPE Nimble Storage.

The initial setup wasn't particularly difficult.

We simply migrated storage volumes from the EqualLogic's, had new ones built in the nimble array, and shifted everything over. There was nothing out of the ordinary.

It does not require a lot of maintenance.

I believe the array, maintenance, and everything totaled around $140,000 dollars.

Certainly, in comparison to what we would have had to consider in order to achieve an equivalent storage capacity with the EqualLogic's end of life, we would have had to migrate to EMC or another platform. It was going to be at least $200,000, and most likely closer to $300,000.

We don't have any extraordinary requirements. We simply require a large amount of shared storage. It's perfectly functional. 

It integrates well with VMware, as do the majority of the products. We are not doing anything exceptional.

I would rate HPE Nimble Storage a ten out of ten.

We use HPE Nimble for deduplication and to compress data.

We have a large number of customers that rely on high availability from this product.

The deduplication and compression capabilities are powerful. We see deduplication savings ratios at ten to one, and twenty to one.

For me, Nimble has two main problems.

There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time. Replacing the controller is what I see as the only major issue, although I'm not sure that HPE can do this.

Nimble has a limit for objects. We have it configured for VMware, so if you have a laptop machine then you have a problem because of this limit. Also, if you have a virtual desktop with a lot of VMs, such as 2,000 to 3,000, then it's a problem because the window has a limit.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for more than two years.

Nimble is a stable product.

Scalability-wise, it is very good.

I have been in contact with technical support and I would rate them an eight or nine out of ten. They are very good.

I am also using HPE 3PAR.

I also have experience with HPE Primera, which is a better product. It's a merge of 3PAR and Nimble and it's a more stable storage solution.

If I were comparing a group of products then I would rate StorageWorks MSA a five, Nimble a seven, 3PAR an eight, Primera a nine, and StorageWorks XP a ten.

The initial setup is very simple, and in fact, the simplest of these solutions.

It takes approximately four hours to deploy including hooking up power, cabling, getting it set up on the rack, and configuration.

Deployment and maintenance are done in-house.

We keep the versions updated.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use of this solution is to host business-critical applications in the cloud for customers.

We can have fewer resources manning and monitoring the storage and we can reallocate resources to work on other things while maintaining confidence in our storage solution.

We have successfully integrated various applications such as SAP Business One, Microsoft Dynamics GP, any of the ERP systems we have tried work.

The Nimble Storage solution has enhanced performance over the previous system.

I haven't got the details of the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) so I don't know it exactly, but definitely performance on the service is much better.

The most valuable feature for our organization is that the solution provides us access to the storage we need without having to have multiple storage experts on staff to address changing storage needs.

As far as what future versions of the product should include, I don't have any experience with what it is lacking. It is really up to the technical guys to determine what is potentially missing from the solution.

The uptime for the solution is excellent. So far, so good.

While we have not had the need to scale yet and we haven't utilized it, it does seem like the utility should scale up quite easily.

The storage capacity efficiency is decent. We get about 2.1 dedupe capabilities using the solution.

Our experiences with technical support have proven to be excellent so far.

We previously used a different solution and knew we needed to change our solution to provide storage for our virtualization. The storage solution we had previously could not provide this and so it was not adequate. It was a rented system from another company and we were not happy with the performance.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. However, we did need to ask some questions to understand how they do the LANs and other technical details of it. There were no major stumbling blocks.

We didn't use a vendor or reseller to deploy. We implemented the solution ourselves.

Our return on investment appears to be excellent. The product delivers a lot of return to our company in various ways.

We purchased the solution for something in the $80,000 range. It was a fixed-price option.

We had a couple of options that we were considering before going with Nimble. We also looked at some of the offerings from Dell. I think those were the two main ones. There was a third one, Tintri, which we were not happy with because of their bankruptcy filings. Nimble was the leading option coming out of the gate and ended up being the solution we selected.

On a scale of one to ten, I would say this product is a nine. I think it does what it promises and support is decent. The only drawback I find is the size of the components. They never told us that the hardware has a large form factor and we were barely able to squeeze it into our older racks.

Storage is a critical piece of our business and, with a small team like the one that we have, Nimble ends up being a pretty good system that fits our need while lowering administrative needs.

For anyone considering this solution seriously, I would suggest you do your research with other competitors out there and look at what you are using, what type of infrastructure you have, as well as resources you have to support your system. Based on that, I would do a small POC (Proof of Concept). The flash version is more expensive, but I think you can get away with this with a hybrid model. The solution we chose is a hybrid system which we found to be just as good as the flash system. We have another system that is flash-only and the hybrid appears to behave just as well. We accomplished that by just adding 20% or so SSDs and doing that gave us what we needed to achieve similar performance.

We have feeds into HP that give us the Infosight analysis. However, I'm not sure if we're doing it proactively.

The all-flash solution could be considered as positioning our organization for growth, but we also have a hybrid system which we find just as good as the flash. Either would position us for growth compared to previous solutions.

Nimble Storage is our primary production storage vendor.  We use this with VMware on a daily basis including a new AFA5000 all-flash array for our DMS system.

These arrays perform very well and have allowed us to move many physical servers to virtual and run them from the Nimble arrays without any performance impact and there is actual performance improvement.

The most valuable features are -

1. Ease of setup

2. Ease of Management with Web UI

3. InfoSight - analytics sight that collects data for all Nimble arrays deployed

InfoSight has been very valuable in determining upgrade requirements, bottlenecks, etc. The latest update to the site now allows Per-VM monitoring within the Virtual Infrastructure now too.

No areas require improvement at this time. The arrays run very well and updates are flawless when completed.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

We have had some stability issues with one array which has happened twice during subsequent software updates but is due to a bad Postgres database. Nimble has been very helpful and are even replacing the array with a brand new one for our troubles.

There are no scalability issues and the arrays can be upgraded with ease.

Customer Service:

Customer service has been top notch with Nimble and would be 10/10. They even worked with use to replace a faulty array.

Technical Support:

Technical Support is one of the best and is 10/10. The autosupport system they have in place that creates tickets for you automatically is great. You can even specify on the InfoSight webpage which ones you want to Auto-Close, etc.

Positive

Previously used Dell EqualLogic arrays but they were end of life.

The initial setup is straightforward. You connect the array to the network and power it up. You then run the Nimble Setup Manager which will detect the array on the network and allow you to complete an initial configuration. Once that is done you can then use the Web UI to finalize the configuration.

It was completed in-house with the assistance from Nimble when required.

Nimble has allowed us to run without much down time giving us a great ROI on our investment.

No other options for storage were evaluated.

Given the chance to evaluate Nimble it is highly recommended. Their CASL architecture is very fast and being able to get the performance from the spinning disk that you see on some flash arrays is great. They are always improving the product and software including the recent changes to the InfoSight web page that allows Per-VM monitoring now. There is also excellent support and customer service when you need it.

The AF5000 array is the primary storage for our iManage DMS 10 document management systems. It allows the best performance for users using the system.

It has allowed us to upgrade our DMS to the latest version and reuse the older array as the DR storage for VMware SRM.  The entire DMS system performance has improved compared to the old which was on a previous generation CS260G.

Having all-flash with two banks of disk for population is great for expansion. InfoSight is always one of the best out there for array reporting and troubleshooting.

The product is great.  When sizing the array based on requirements the option to add more network cards for throughput would be something to help clients.  Product Support is best in class as always.

We have been using this solution for three to five years.

No stability issues.

No issues here and we have a full bank for disk expansion.

Customer Service:

Customer service is great and they go above and beyond to help.

Technical Support:

Technical support is second to none out there combined with Infosight. Also having technicians assigned directly to you when needed is great!

Positive

No, we are a Nimble shop with nine arrays now.

Straightforward and very easy, as always.

Implementation was in-house, done by myself.

ROI will be determined over the next year, after we go-live.

When selecting a vendor make sure to validate with the vendor that the throughput is enough. With the AF5000, it is 2GB/s write and 4GB/s read, which we are maxing out. Also, ensure to get the right amount of network cards.

Also, make sure that the specifications meet the application domain and ensure the right amount of network cards are in the array.

Nothing else was evaluated.

Nimble AF is a great platform and is only getting better. On top of that, InfoSight's great technical support makes it an easy choice.