HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We use it for all of our storage, backups, and our user storage. Everything goes onto it. We have gone from multiple devices down to a single Nimble.

It hosts all of our databases for all of our servers. It hosts the servers themselves and our GFS retention jobs. It hosts everything that is critical for our business.

We went from hosting a lot of our external storage on ten different NASs. Now, we have all of our storage on a Nimble. Previously, we had three or four chassis just full of stuff. We consolidated our server space down to 25 percent of what it used to be, just from storage.

It is because of the way Nimble handles that storage. It can compress it down, making it smaller for us.

On some of our backup jobs, we are getting a dedupe rate of 11 to 13 times. Nimble is taking up a minuscule amount of actual raw storage for backups, etc.

Data management has improved vastly. We have gone from multiple devices down to a single device, making management much simpler. Previously, you could spend hours just going from one device to another, and now, it is all in a central location.

It has improved the throughput because of how the device interconnects with our network. It has 10 gig connections to the network and also multiple 8 gig connections through our Brocade switches back to the server farm. From just the sheer number of connections that it makes onto the network and devices, the throughput is staggering.

We have over 100 terabytes of storage, and it is all solid state. That is pretty valuable for everything we do.

The build alone is amazing and the way everything is modular. It's swapable. 

The storage capacity efficiency is phenomenal. It is off the charts in comparison to the compression ratios that we got before. We are able to save a lot more to the device.

I would like to see the network portion of the product improve, especially with some of the things which are coming out from Aruba and HPE. Both are innovating more of an automated networking. I would like to see our Nimble meld into that and do some automated networking.

The product is up 99.99 percent of the time, and it just stays up. We have it on multiple power supplies. The product runs constantly. When there is a problem, it notifies you of the problem. 

We have never had any critical failures with it. It is always up. Every time a single component is broken, it has been repaired within 24 hours. 

The parts are hot swapable. We just get a part in the mail, and we are good to go. You literally walk in, pull one out, and put a new one in, then the thing is running again.

The scalability is great. We just scaled up. We just bought the additional hard drive array for it, and we love it.

I don't think we are even utilizing 50 percent of the all-flash. We intentionally bought that anticipating growth.

Nimble is scalable and modular enough that you can take whatever solutions that you had in the past, pull those all together, and put them into a Nimble. It does all the things that we did before in a single package.

The technical support is awesome. They are actually monitoring the device. When we have had a hard drive failure, we have found that we come into work, and they are notifying us that a hard drive failed overnight. We haven't even had a chance to look at it yet.

The former CIO hadn't upgraded anything in almost 20 years. Everything that we had was completely outdated. We wanted to move to a more efficient solution for our on-premise stuff. We were also looking into things with the cloud, but that doesn't have a lot to do with Nimble, per se. We just needed to modernize.

We had all on-premise bare metal servers. We got rid of it four years ago, when they were still doing their backups to tape. This is why when we went to the Nimble. We cut our use of space down to about 25 percent.

Our other systems administrator dealt with the integration of the product.

I think we used an integrator and a consultant. They were on campus for about five days, helping us integrate everything and move everything over.

For education, ROI is pretty hard to determine. However, that was part of the finance portion. Our chief financial officer sat down and did an ROI on it and came to the same conclusion that we did: Nimble is the right choice for us.

We are paying for the licensing yearly.

We had Dell EMC, Nimble, and 3PAR come out. Our partner is Logicalis, and they set up all these interviews for us. We interviewed them one at a time. With our partner, we came to the decision that Nimble was the right choice for us.

There is nothing like it that we can buy that even comes close to this product. We looked at five different products, then we decided to go with Nimble. It is hands down the best device that was available to us.

I would definitely point a colleague toward the Nimble product. Most of my peers are also at universities, and the product fits perfectly into what we are trying to do. As another administrator at another university, it will be key to what they are doing.

It has met all of our needs. We haven't had any issues.

They have been consistently innovating stuff and seeing it before we even think of the possible outcomes. We are consistently shocked by what is coming out.

We do HIPAA compliance as a university. Part of that compliance has to do with how we back up employee files, which we do on the cloud, but we don't use the Nimble for that. 

Our Nimble unit serves our corporate storage infrastructure, all running VMware on top of it. It's primarily VDI file storage and the virtual environment itself.

We have been using it for about three years and the performance has been excellent. We haven't had any outages.

Our upgrades are seamless. Whether we're adding storage, or upgrading the software, we don't take an outage for those upgrades.

Also, InfoSight does exactly what it needs to do. It tells us when we have problems and if we need to move things around. Mostly we use it for capacity planning so we can get the forecast of when we're going to be out of space and order more disk expansion before we run out of actual space.

The only thing that I can really compare Nimble to is all-flash because, right now, Nimble is a hybrid solution. I would like to see them come out with an all-flash alternative.

I'd also like to see them incorporate tools that let me get granular with the VMs. I want to see an individual VM, I want to Snapshot and recover an individual VM. Those are the kind of daily operations features that I'd like to see.

Stability is great. We have never had a problem with the arrays.

In terms of scalability, it's excellent. I think we have four of them now.

We have used technical support. Everything has been solved really quickly. Because I'm the vice president, I don't do the engineer's work but I would hear about it if there was a problem.

In terms of how technical support compares to support provided by other companies, our other source product is EMC and it's very difficult to be worse than EMC.

The switch was because of budgetary constraints. I knew I couldn't put in an EMC array in the initial solution that we used before, which was for VDI. If I had tried to deal with the EMC, I would not have gotten the performance and it would have cost a lot more. 

So we had to look outside the box. We chose Nimble over Tintri at the time, because Tintri's solution, while very good - with the things I was talking about, like granular VM, etc. - it's a footprint that you have to buy all at once. For the Nimble, I buy the unit and I can keep adding to it. With Tintri you have to pick a 13-terabyte or a 45-terabyte and when you run out of that, you buy another 45-terabyte. To me, it just didn't seem as expandable.

In terms of criteria for selecting a vendor, other than scalability and price, the key is performance. The bar was set at EMC. EMC just adds flash disks to a standard array and accelerates things somewhat, but it really doesn't get you to where you need to be. With EMC, you need to buy a lot of disks, you need to get into the 200s for spindle count. With any of the newer hybrid solutions - Tintri, Nimble, Pure - those are all all-flash solutions or hybrid solutions that take advantage of flash the way it's supposed to be.

I'm based out of Southern California. We first implemented it in Virginia, so I flew in to meet an engineer to complete it. By the time I had flown in and got to the data center, he was already done. I expected it to take several hours but it was more like an hour, and most of that hour was unpacking it out of the box.

Compared to EMC, you can't install EMC's products yourself, and it's days of implementation.

If we had stuck with EMC, we would have spent a lot more. We have EMC in-house, we have a bunch of them. Switching to Nimble saved me millions of dollars over the past three years.

Our production environment runs off of Pure Storage, our corporate environment runs off of Nimble.

I'd put Nimble at about an eight out of 10 because Pure storage reset our standard for what is absolutely the best. Pure is a whole different platform and not hybrid. I like Nimble, it's very good, it works, it's definitely cost-effective. It's not all-flash, so you don't get the performance of all-flash. But if you don't have a couple of million dollars to spend on Pure, Nimble is an excellent choice.

In terms of advice, it gets down to budget. Nimble fills a need for performance within a budget that is in the sub-million dollar range. If you're going up over a million dollars, where you can just throw money at the solution, there is Pure and there is Texas Memory Systems and all those high-end solutions. But if you want enterprise-level storage and you want a hybrid, the Nimble has served us well.

We use Nimble for both our primary storage and for VDI.

It has improved our ability to deliver care to patients quickly. Our previous arrays, they were having a lot of slowness issues and that was impacting the way that our providers were giving patient care. It has really helped us keep up and keep our users happy, and keep our patients safe and healthy.

Ease of installation, it's very easy to set up, to get up and running. It works well, I don't have any issues with it. Also, they have unparalleled customer support. You call in and you talk to a technician who knows what he's doing and can typically solve your problem on that call.

I use InfoSight quite a bit. It works well. It allows you to get some insight into what's happening in your environment immediately, instead of having to send things off and having them analyzed and sent back to you.

The only thing I'm really looking for in my next array is some hyperconverged, so if they had something in that space... But I know they have SimpliVity so that is probably not going to happen.

It's very stable. As far as staying up, we're a hospital, we run 24/7, 365 days a year. We can't afford to be down and it has been completely stable. Even through upgrades, there is no downtime, not even a hiccup for users.

I don't know how far up it scales. It certainly scales up far enough for our needs. We're not a huge environment so it meets all of our needs.

With the array we had, the maintenance contract was over and it was going to cost us a lot to continue support on it. Plus, we were having a lot of latency issues with it and a lot of complaints from users. We had a lot of support calls. We did a PoC on the Nimble and we were able to immediately show that it would improve our performance.

Our criteria when evaluating vendors include ease of use, something with a good management interface that doesn't require plug-ins or Java or Flash, so having the HTML5 interface was ideal. I really looked for something that would give me insight into what was happening on the array in my stack. With other arrays I've had in the past, it was really hard to pinpoint whether it was a storage issue, or a server issue, or a network issue. I also wanted an all-flash solution because I had tried some tiered storage before and it never seemed to have the data in the right tier. I had flash storage but what needed to be running fast wasn't in flash, it was on SATA and performance would take a hit.

We went with Nimble because it fit all our criteria. Also, the sales team was great and the fact that they offer free training is awesome. There are not very many vendors that do that. Doing our PoC really proved that it was the product that we needed to fill our needs.

The setup was very straightforward. It was the quickest array I've ever set up in my life. Other systems, I sometimes spent a month getting them up and configured. With help from support and technicians onsite, my SE from Nimble came out, I had it up and running in 10 minutes and moved production loads over to it.

We saw a really quick return on investment with it because of the issues that we were having. We were able to reduce our support calls by about 70 percent. And on top of that our staff's time - the ability to take care of patient faster. I would say within three months or we got ROI on it.

We looked at EMC, Pure Storage, and VxRail.

Look at the portfolio and decide what meets your needs because there is a wide range of performance that you can get out there. I've been burned before, a little bit, on some of the lower-performance arrays. You get them in there and within three months you have already maxed out the performance. So make sure you buy what you need. Get something that's going to be upgradable and last.

Nimble has really met all of our needs and at a price we could afford. It certainly wasn't as expensive as a lot of other all-flash solutions that we could have bought. It does what we need it to do. It's expandable, everything is built into it, you don't have to go by other agents to do things, the replication is built in.

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 use Nimble Storage to virtualize several specialized workloads. 

Nimble's phone-home capability is decent. The compression, dedupe, and caching are also solid. Generally, I like the simplicity. It's almost a set-and-forget solution.

Nimble Storage could increase its flexibility by adding more protocol options. Nimble mainly uses fibre channel protocols, whereas many other storage arrays support fibre channel, iCSI, and NFS protocols.

I have used Nimble Storage for more than eight years. 

I rate Nimble Storage eight out of 10 for stability.

I rate Nimble Storage seven out of 10 for scalability. I have used it for organizations with user bases ranging from 500 to 3,000.

I rate HPE customer service eight out of 10.

Positive

The other product we used was no longer available, so we switched to the next-best solution. 

I rate Nimble Storage seven out of 10 for ease of setup. It's relatively straightforward. We've deployed it ourselves, but we had professional services do it a few times. It went smoothly both ways. Deployment takes about a week. 

I rate Nimble Storage seven out of 10 for affordability. The price could be improved. We aren't using the subscription-based version, so we are fully on-prem with a five-year support license. 

We evaluated a few vendors, including Dell EMC, NetApp, and IBM. Nimble Storage delivered the most bang for our buck. It was also relatively simple to deploy. 

I rate HPE Nimble Storage seven out of 10. It's a good solution, but there are other options. I would recommend it, depending on your workloads. 

It is our primary source platform. It underlines all of our Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 applications. We use hybrid, not flash.

It has reduced the requirement to have a specialist storage engineer.

InfoSight has allowed us to centralize our management, understanding how it correlates to the array. It has identified a network issue in the network configuration of ESXi hosts. It enables us to get servers back up faster by 25 percent.

It has stabilized throughput and provided less downtime for our applications.

• Simplicity of use
• Maintenance

I would like to have integration into cloud providers, apart from HPE.

The release cycle for the firmware upgrades could be improved. They are a bit long.

It's very stable. It is 100 percent up.

It's very scalable. We can scale it up and down.

We haven't had to increase capacity.

The technical support is fantastic.

The existing SAN was no longer a fit for purpose.

The initial setup was incredibly simple. It was up and running within half an hour.

We deployed it in-house.

It has increased our performance and allowed us to expand out what we can deliver.

Definitely, give the product a go and do a PoC.

It fits my needs perfectly.

Biggest lesson learnt: Sometimes, the simplest solution is actually a complex solution.

Availability of our environment has exceeded “five nines”, along with performance being stellar.

Performance, reliability, InfoSight, the ability to upgrade the O/S on the SAN without taking it down, and cost.

Poor performance and reliability would adversely affect my company’s productivity, and thus would increase overall labor costs as people took longer to do their jobs. (Especially if and when critical systems were down due to an outage.) It would also negatively affect employee and customer perception of the quality of IT services.

InfoSight is extremely valuable, because it gives us (IT) a direct understanding of historical performance and capacity trends, including projected utilization based on those trends. This in turn allows us to perform capacity planning before we reach the point where it becomes an issue. Further, some of the information in InfoSight gives us a direct understanding of which of our virtual servers is the most I/O bound. That allows us to investigate the server and mitigate disk traffic through configuration changes at the server level.

Regarding uninterrupted upgrades, one of the biggest problems with upgrading SANs is the fact that (except for Nimble!) you have to take down the SAN to do so. This requires the quiescence of any servers relying on that storage, and thus a service stoppage. While this can be done on a scheduled basis as “scheduled downtime”, the fact that Nimble permits us to upgrade transparently WITHOUT service interruption not only improves perceptions of IT, but it also changes what is normally a multi-hour process into a 30 minute process… saving time and money.

Right now, all Nimble arrays offer data compression to disk, but only the Flash (SSD) arrays offer in-line deduplication. I’d like to see in-line deduplication extended to Nimble non-flash (called “Hybrid”) arrays, even if it’s only the C500 and higher controllers that support it.

While I speak about “five nines”, the truth is we’ve had 100% up-time (no outages, not even planned) for over 3 years.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is extraordinary. Their technical support often helps us with VMware issues and related products when the issue isn’t with their SAN – which is almost always true.

We used NetApp. We switched due to performance and manageability requirements. NetApp was simply an average performer, and managing it was difficult.

The SAN setup itself was simple and easy. The biggest challenge we had was in changing our network to accommodate turning off Spanning Tree Protocol for that segment.

If you evaluate a SAN based on total cost of ownership, you have to consider the cost to the company for down time and maintenance windows, among other things. Their price structure for purchase and pricing for maintenance is excellent. Just as importantly, there are no “additional software modules” to buy at an added price. You get everything up front.

From a price/performance perspective, Nimble simply can’t be beat. From a TCO perspective, the stability alone pays for itself.

We evaluated offerings from IBM, HP, EMC, and a number of smaller vendors, such as AppAssure.

Be prepared for your staff to want to abandon all other SAN’s you may have in place. Make sure your network and network switches are capable of handling the performance, because it would be a shame to buy something so incredibly fast only to choke it down on the Ethernet side of things.

Our primary use case if for our central data storage. This contains our files, financial services, and customer data.

We are a 24/7 operation, even though our corporate office is a typical Monday through Friday operation. It is vital that we have all of our data up and running, all of the time because a lot of our customers have what they call "volume runs" during the month. For example, one of our customers is subscription-based, so we have to run about three million packages during a two-week timeframe. All of the data has to be fully accessible and we can't afford to have any downtime.

This solution has increased our performance by ten to fifteen percent. From both an operational standpoint and management perspective, it is an improvement. It has also reduced costs and allowed us to allocate more towards other projects.

My engineers have said that this solution has improved our throughput. This has helped because when a customer comes up asked for a solution then we can guarantee it will actually meet the demand for their product or service.

The All-Flash storage positions us for growth because of the speed aspect. We have pool data that doesn’t have to be accessed quickly, but when it comes to other things then we are required to be on the spot. This is especially true for SQL databases.

The most valuable features of this solution are it's reliability and the redundancy that it provides. This is also a good product from a financial perspective.

The performance of this solution allows us to have real-time access for SQL databases.

I would like to see more advanced analytics in the next release of this solution. Perhaps it will help us to see things that we're not seeing already.

We have almost one hundred percent uptime. It seems very reliable and cost-effective, and it seems like it can be molded to any solution that you need.

From what I have heard, it is extremely scalable. It is interesting because you can start with a very small margin and expand to as high as you want, with very little effort on the side of the end-user.

Technical support for this solution is very good. It's always on-demand, and we never feel like we're too far off from getting support. It's always available when we need it, and you're getting a live person a lot faster than you would from other providers.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup of this solution was a lot more straightforward than we thought it was going to be.

We handled the deployment in-house.

The ROI from this solution comes from the savings in time, just from managing and keeping everything up and running. It also reduces the stress and burden on our database team.

We looked at providers other than HP, such as Pure Storage, but we don't like to be on the bleeding edge. We prefer to be with providers that have been stable and around for a long period of time.

This solution is efficient in more than one way. Not only is it high performing, but it is also more compact and fits better in our storage arrays than equipment from other storage providers. This helps out with space in the data center.

We have experienced an increase in performance of ten to fifteen percent.

This product has proven itself to be very reliable and we're looking forward to where it's going to take us in the future. Everything that they've told us it's going to do, it has done and exceeded.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is not to run at any solution that is already out there. Really dive into what it is that you need. Find out what your baseline is, and have a number in mind from a cost perspective. Then take a look at what your priorities are. Is it cost, or uptime, or perhaps having a reliable solution? Always define what your parameters are.

My advice to anybody considering a solution such as this is to always do your research. Look at everything, including peer evaluations, and always take your time. I have met a lot of people that try to rush into a solution and then end up finding stuff that they didn't think they needed. So, as much as possible, take your time and do your studies.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.