HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We use it in small business setups with 10, 15, or 20 VMs per customer. Our entire system runs on Nimble Storage, e.g., Windows Active Directory, Windows Servers, and WEP.

Everything is just faster. Though, it is not necessarily required for the deployment that we do. It just gives us a bit of that extra speed.

InfoSight has helped us resolved an issue where the snapshots were growing too big.

Speed versus storage space is the most valuable feature.

I don't think it is officially released yet, but the main reason that we chose Nimble is because of the sync rep feature. So, I would like to see that further evolve. This feature will be essential for our setups.

The stability is good. I have no issues.

The uptime is good. I can update without any downtime, so that is good.

The scalability is average. We had a unit that wasn't that old, which we couldn't extend anymore.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is good.

The technical support is awesome.

When it came to renewal, the requirements are based on customer demands and projects.

The initial setup is always easy. It was easy before it was part of HPE, so I am happy that they took this with them.

We deployed in-house.

The solution has increased performance.

Our hybrid solution could do with some more competitive pricing and more scaled-down deployments. Already, the smallest one is too much for us. We would flourish by having a smaller unit.

If you don't go cheap, it is eventually worth it. However, the initial investment is high.

We looked at Nimble and NetApp.

I have had some bad experiences previously with the performance of the NetApp units, which is the reason that we went with Nimble.

Go with Nimble if you want the best.

It is reliable, the support is good, and it provides us with good performance.

The primary use case is production storage. We run ERP applications, as an example, of our business-critical applications.

There has been no downtime, which is probably the best thing.

We use InfoSight predictive analytics. It helps us from a performance perspective by identifying potential bottlenecks.

InfoSight has identified controller failures or performance issues.

Performance and support are its most valuable features.

The uptime has been solid.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is good. We bought it in such a way that we could add disk to it, so we provided foresight into our purchase anyway.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is good. The new solution is doing deduplication now, as well as compression. The old solutions could only do compression, so it has been good that way.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. Our last solution did not.

The technical support is excellent. My team is extremely happy with Nimble Support and InfoSight.

We had performance issue on our previous solution (AF3000).

The initial setup was straightforward because we have a rep who we have dealt with for six to seven years.

We used a reseller, CDW, for the deployment. Our experience with CDW was good, but it was our Nimble HPE rep who really did the work.

The solution has doubled our performance, which is why we upgraded.

The solution has improved our throughput, keeping applications responsive.

It is a CAPEX investment. Over the anticipated lifespan, I would say the pricing is $10,000 a month.

The price has room for improvement.

Pure Storage and Nimble were on our shortlist. 

We chose Nimble because they were the incumbent. We had a good experience with them. They have good support. Ultimately, they had the better price.

We receive great support. We have had no unplanned downtime.

Our experience with the product has been excellent.

We use it to extend the data center a little further. We have videos which are very large in size and which cannot be compressed. We ran out of space in the data center so we moved the media data center and expanded it. The videos are a business-critical application. We provide videos for students to access 24/7.

We feel that we can rely on this solution more for the business-critical applications we have, compared to what we had earlier.

Also, the all-flash positions our organization for growth. Video quality keeps increasing. From 4K we are now moving to 8K and we expect that the size of each video file is going to grow very high. So our data size is increasing very fast.

In addition, we have noticed that the solution has increased performance.

We like the performance.

I would like to see more integrations. They might already have them, but I want to integrate it with the different hardware we have.

We moved to this solution for the stability. We had an HPE consultant configuring it and we went through some of those features that it enables. We also like the cloud-ready portion and when we move to the cloud that will be used as another factor in justifying our decision.

In terms of scalability, when I said "cloud," that was one of the things that we looked at when considering how we would grow, how we would expand. We are still evaluating. We do have some cloud storage, but we want to have one solution for that. We definitely think that with this product's features, we can go into the cloud and scale to whatever we like.

Technical support has been good so far. We had one issue up til now, but we are good. They took care of it.

We had legacy storage and my team recommended that we had to move to something new.

The initial setup was straightforward. We estimated, in the beginning, that we could do it over the weekend, and it went as we planned. We didn't see any issues.

We had an HPE consultant. Our experience was good.

We haven't evaluated ROI yet.

We had Dell EMC, as well as the company that was originally Sun Microsystems. We also had a couple of startups. We went with HPE mostly because of the familiarity and because my team recommended it because of its performance.

We like the flexibility. Anybody who is looking for a product that is easy to use and deploy, this is good.

I do need to evaluate the security aspect of it, especially intelligence to counter any unpredictable growth. I would also like to see how to use the storage space efficiently, because we do, at times, suddenly come across big videos.

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.

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.