HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We have type of a private cloud-hosted solution in our data center. Nimble allows incredibly, fast data access for our SAN to our hypervisors and cluster. Nimble is just so good at what they do as far as the adaptive and hybrid flash stuff. We have two arrays: We have an adaptive and hybrid. 

We have a lot of healthcare clients. We have some who are in surgery at five in the morning. We are running these pretty heavy, intensive databases and SQL servers on the Nimble (or which are pulling off the Nimble). Having that type of server pinned to a specific volume, then having that volume accessible and prioritized over the other data which is on there, that is super helpful. This is why we like Nimble and what they do.

We want rock solid stability, making sure all of our customers have complete 100 percent uptime, which is our goal. Nimble achieves that pretty well.

InfoSight is a regular part of our weekly routine. We don't use it every single day, but we do check in on things every once in a while. Luckily, with Nimble, you can forget it and you don't really have to worry about it. However, if we do need to look into an issue, we definitely use InfoSight.

InfoSight has increased the availability of analytics and our ability to quickly get to them. We can migrate things faster. We can pull stuff out of production. We can restore from backups more quickly with the Nimble system than anything else.

We have had a couple of networking issues, temperature alarms, and a few things in our data center going on where InfoSight will scale back our utilization (or whatever) in order to keep us productive and up.

InfoSight has enabled us to get our servers back up faster, especially on the back-end. We have instant recovery. We are able to access that fast storage within seconds, which is very helpful. It enabled us to get service back up in a minute and a half.

The solution has improved our throughput tremendously. It has been on-demand access with 10 gig fiber. The disks, even though some of them are spinning discs, are rated, or in Nimble's little custom config in the way that it hits the cache first, then throws it off to the cold later. This is perfect, and it is great. It has improved everything.

The way that it optimizes the hot data versus cold data is really what Nimble does super well. 

I would like deduplication by default on all the volumes. I still don't understand (or know why) dedupe isn't enabled for the templates out-of-the-box. We have to go in and manually enable it each and every time. It might help to have a software revision for something like this, or even a more intuitive local dashboard, not InfoSight, but Nimble's local dash. That would be great.

The UI and local dash need improvement. They have changed it around a little bit between firmware upgrades. When you do that, things are out of place and not where they used to be. There is also some granular nitty-gritty analytics that we would like to get down into deeper, like when you view volumes, you have percent-free space, and the ability to sort those volumes by the percentage or sort by the amount of data: the megabytes, gigabytes, etc. That is no longer available in the new UI. I would love to see that improved, where you can sort down the list. 

While InfoSight is very useful, if you widen your scope of range when you're trying to look at a month of reports, the averaging that it does sort of skews things a bit. If you drill down further into a day or hour, it looks a lot better. I wish they would have a chart or GUI that didn't average as heavily, just giving you minute spikes and things that you could see on a wider view.

The stability is awesome. The product has always been reliable. It has been 100 percent up. We have never had any downtime with it. Even if a controller fails due to our firmware or whatever, it rolls over to the second one and keeps us running.

Outside of the outages which are beyond Nimble, such as power issues in the data center or heat. Nothing has been an issue with the Nimble product.

The scalability is awesome. We have the potential for multiple petabytes moving forward. While we don't take advantage of that right now, as we only have maybe 400 to 500 terabytes, the scalability (and the ability to add a shelf dynamically by just throwing it in there and adding it to the pool) is simple and easy. We already did this with our CS300, and it turned out real well.

Nimble's support is awesome and one of the best. You sort of get a Tier 3 plus guy every time that you call, no matter if it is a Tier 0 issue. This is super helpful in case we ever have problems.

The technical support never has anything that they can't solve for us. I have thrown everything at them that I could, and they are always on top of it.

We were running out of space. The ability to compress and dedupe stuff with Nimble is unmatched.

Coming off old Dell EMC PowerVaults and our own custom SAN solution that that we had running with storage, it has changed our entire ecosystem dramatically with the fast access times and the 10 gig fiber coming off of it. There is just nothing like it. The access times are less than two milliseconds. 

We keep our latency super low, even with 200 plus servers on it, which has really changed the ball game. Access to that data used to be a lot slower. Now, it's not, which is great.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I set up one last week, and you plug in your basic information for the array: The name and IPs, then you add it to your group, defining where you want it to point to. It's simple. It took me about 10 minutes to get everything up and rolling with the new HF.

We used a reseller, Flair Data Systems, out of Colorado Springs for our deployment. Flair has been awesome. They are partners for a lot of other things, as well as Nimble products.

We have seen tremendous ROI. It pays for itself 10 times over in the matter of four years.

The solution has increased our performance. We have about 20 times the IOPS that we use to, which was a huge selling point for us. We don't even use close to the amount that it is capable of handling, but it is certainly 20 times faster than what we had before.

We looked at Dell EMC, Nimbus, and Nimble.

Nimble just stuck out of the pack. The demo that they gave us years ago was really what sold it. We have a reseller who we work with, and we are a partner with them for other things. We do networks for them, and they do other system switching for us. The reseller had a Nimble and demonstrate it to us, which made the deal right there. It wasn't Nimble who did the demo, it was the reseller, and the reseller really came through.

Try it out. Demo it. Just have somebody put it in front of you, so you can poke around and demonstrate how it works with a real environment. Check out a Hyper-V or VMware. VMware is a lot more integrated with Nimble than Hyper-V. Live migrate your stuff. Move your stuff. Send backups to it. Send it over across the wire to a DR. Everything just works, and that is what we want.

It has been rock solid, 100 percent on time, and we have never had any issues with it.

We receive about a 2.4x compression rate, even on our old HPE CS300. With the new HF-Series, we will probably achieve a lot more than that because they have a lot of deduplication, etc. Unfortunately, we just deployed that last week. So, we are still in the trial process with it.

All-flash is coming down the pipeline. We don't have all-flash yet. We have all hybrid arrays. We are moving in that direction probably within the next two years or so.

We don't utilize any public cloud or HPE cloud stuff yet.

Biggest lesson learnt: Always go with a great vendor that has a great product.

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. 

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.

Our customers use the solution for cyber security.

The solution provides all the essential features for various project requirements.

They should improve the solution's pricing.

It is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable. We have more than 100 customers using the solution.

The solution's technical support is good. Although, we face challenges with hardware delivery.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. But its complexity depends on specific requirements. The deployment process takes three months to complete.

The solution is more expensive than Dell Unity. We have purchased a yearly license for it. The additional costs depend upon the use cases.

I rate the solution as a seven.

We use the solution as VMware SRM’s database storage.

The tool’s support is feasible.

The solution’s stability could be better. The tool’s pricing is high and depends on the partner.

I have been using the solution for two to three years.

I would rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten. The solution is quite stable. We rarely have issues with storage.

The tool is almost scalable. We have one to two users for the solution.

HPE’s support is good. They respond fast.

Positive

The product’s initial setup is straightforward. The initial setup was done by HPE. We manage the solution’s storage and maintenance.

We are the solution’s integrators. 

We have seen ROI with the tool’s use.

The solution’s licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. We require one technical engineer for the product’s maintenance.

HPE Nimble Storage's best features are that it's stable and user-friendly.

HPE Nimble Storage could be improved with some critical application or servers. Currently, we have to compensate for this by using flash storage. In the next release, HPE Nimble Storage should include active clusters and a hybrid file service. 

I've been using HPE Nimble Storage for two years.

HPE Nimble Storage is very stable and performs well.

HPE's technical support could be improved, but their response time is quite good, and their remote troubleshooting is quite helpful.

Previously, we used Compellent, but HPE Nimble Storage's performance is far better and faster. We also use Pure Storage in addition to HPE Nimble Storage as it provides more stable, faster performance and active storage on two different sides.

The initial setup was straightforward and took about two weeks to complete.

We used an SI to implement HPE Nimble Storage.

HPE Nimble Storage's price is moderate - I would rate it at three out of five.

I would give HPE Nimble Storage a rating of seven out of ten.

We primarily use Nimble Storage for our production system.

We have a three-tier infrastructure.

The most useful features are high availability and the storage snapshot backup functionality.

The cost of this storage solution should be lower.

In the future, I would like to see a lower-end model that has Peer Persistence functionality.

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

Nimble is a stable storage solution.

This is a highly scalable product.

The technical support is very good. I can get expert support from an HPE engineer or instead, receive support online.

The initial setup is easy.

The pricing is expensive, although we do not pay anything in addition to the standard licensing fees.

My advice to anybody who is interested in HPE Nimble Storage is that I recommend it for high availability applications. I also suggest that they purchase spare parts for it.

Overall, this product is okay, and my only real complaint is about the cost.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have two use cases for the solution. One use case is for our daily work. Another use case is our shared platform. We are a service provider and we have our shared platform to sell some power, some compute and storage to our customers.

The improvement of our organization with Nimble Storage really is with the InfoSight cloud. We are much more proactive. We are never surprised by problems, some disks or control breaks or something like that. The whole staff is very proactive, and we have no problems. We have very high availability of the systems, and that's the main improvement; the end-to-end management from the server, hypervisor, all the storage.

The most valuable feature is the management of Nimble Storage, InfoSight. This is like a cloud. That's really a very nice feature. I think that's the only reason to buy Nimble Storage.

The only area of the product that could be improved is if you have to buy additional storage, you have to buy a block. You can't buy two or four hard drives as you can buy for every other system. You have to buy a block of 24 disks, and that's normally very expensive. So if a customer calls and they want to expand the system for a few terabytes, you have to sell them an expensive solution, and it's the same for us. But that's just part of the system. That's part of the architecture.

A feature that would be a nice addition to the next release would be a filer option. A filer option so that you could connect the sim or NFS or chips like NetApp does for NAS functionality.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. We are very happy with the product.

I have been using Nimble solutions for about four years, since it became part of HPE.

The solution is really very, very stable. We have never had any issues.

The solution is scalable in every direction. You can change the controller online, you can add additional drives, you can add additional connectivity; it's really scalable.

For the Nimble part, support is very available because it's InfoSight. You don't need any first and second-level engineers because of this InfoSight part. And if you really have a problem, but we never have, then you will be able to contact the third level or the engineering. That's really a big improvement, this cloud solution.

We were still using 3PAR storage before we had EVA Storage System. We are a very loyal HPE customer for many, many years, for ourselves and also as a vendor. We have used HPE storage for ourselves for 25 years.

We switched to Nimble Storage because of InfoSight. You can say 3PAR also had InfoSight, but it was not the same quality. It's better right now. And for us, because we have customer systems in our infrastructure, it's very important to have very high availability in our systems. We have to get SLAs, the service-level agreements.

The initial setup was very easy, but we are used to installing storage systems. We have been a storage seller for many years, around 25 years. So it's getting easier and easier.

The deployment takes about one hour. It takes more time to build it in the racks and link the cabling, but the rest is very easy.

I do all the deployment and consultant work myself.

Once you purchase the solution, you don't have to buy a license for Nimble. All of the features are included. You never need to buy a license.

Before choosing Nimble Storage, we also evaluated NetApp and Dell EMC. The biggest difference was the management stuff with InfoSight.

Ninety percent of the Nimble Storage we have sold because of InfoSight. I would advise potential users to check their management ecosystem and not the storage. The differentiator, and for me the most important part, is the management of the system. Because every system is fast and has high availability. That's normal at the moment. 

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that most of the storage problems are not storage-related. Because of the InfoSight cloud, you can see the whole ecosystem end to end. It's not always because a system is slow that's part of the storage; it could also be a server problem, it could also be a network problem, it could be something else. With InfoSight, this end-to-end view, we saw that most of these storage problems were not really storage problems.

Production Storage, all of our 200 virtual servers use this storage.

HPE Nimble Storage reach 4:1 compression/deduplicate rate, optimizing used space.

I have found the convergence rate and deduplication the most valuable features.

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

The solution is stable.

The scalability of HPE Nimble Storage has been good.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution and we do not plan to increase usage at this time.

The technical support is knowledgeable.

Previous solution had many licenses for each feature, with high OPEX and manage complexity.

The initial setup is simple compared to other solutions and it took approximately one month.

The resellers did the implementation of the solution, we did not do it ourselves. We have ten people for the deployment of the solution.

There is a monthly fee to use the solution.

Yes, Lenovo and DELL/EMC storages.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage a ten out of ten.