HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

The primary use case is to monitor my storage.

We are in radiology. Although most of our radiologists just read x-rays, there are moments when it is STAT read, where they have to read things ASAP. This applies to the emergency room and emergency departments. Sometimes, things need to be read, and it is a matter of life or death. This can also apply to cancers, detections, etc. Therefore, we need to make sure the storage stays up, and it is working. Then, our radiologists can do their job.

For us, it is about speed and stability. There are a lot of redundancies in place. I am able to access what I need to access. 

Our situation is sort of unique. We need fast disk for compute, but then we also need more traditional disk for our images. Having Nimble, where I can have both fast and traditional disk in one pane, and still see everything, is pretty awesome. 

We use InfoSight for predictive analysis because the answer to most of our problems is that, "It isn't our problem." However, we are being blamed for it. Thus, I can get my answers improved by using InfoSight that it isn't us causing the problem by going into it. For example, one of our applications was acting weird, and we had the application vendor on. They really couldn't answer much. As one of my troubleshoot methods, I said, "Let me check InfoSight." I logged in, and I could see a VM that was heavily pegged and almost in a critical-like status. That VM was the reason why the issue was the way it was. Now, It wasn't because of our infrastructure set up, it still was an application issue, but I was able to pinpoint exactly what it was based off of that.

That application with problems had about 30 servers. As I'm not an application vendor, I don't know which servers serve what purpose within the application. I was able to go into InfoSight, and it told me that one in particular needed to be worked on, so I didn't have to waste time looking at the other 29 servers. Therefore, I knew that one was the one that we work on, and that is the one that needs to be fixed.

We use a platform as a service and have multiple application vendors who comprise that platform. There are moments when those application vendors put the blame on us. By working in InfoSight, I am able to say, "No, it is not us." I can actually provide proof, either by using screenshots or through reporting. 

I wish they would put the InfoSight page back the way it was. I got in it for the first time about two years ago, and it looked the same for about a year and a half. Then, about six months ago, it changed. There are different options now. I can still get to where I need to go, but it feels like it takes longer, where before it didn't. Also, I felt like I had a lot more options before. I have to do a lot more to digging now to get to where I need to go. I just wish they had their old page back.

There are a lot of redundancies in all the right areas, so it is pretty stable.

I get alerts, email, and texts that I regularly check a couple of times a day.

I check the solution's storage capacity a couple times a day. One of the tasks in the morning is someone on my team will go in and take a screenshot of exactly what our capacity is at the moment. Then, we are able to do trend analysis and some forecasting of when we think our capacity is going to be close to maximum or not.

I have already already grown it and added an extra array earlier last year. I still have room for more. So, the scalability is pretty good.

This solution is not for growth, but it can grow. We have the capability to grow, but we're not there yet.

I rarely call the technical support, but when I do, they are good.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is a lot of plug and play. Although, there was a diagram of instructions, which was maybe one sheet long. So, it was easy. A lot of that stuff was already ready for me.

When I scaled up, the system came to me, and I did it myself.

We do use a reseller, Logicalis.

We are still too new with our product to know what the ROI is.

The solution has improved our throughput.

We looked at other storage companies. The fact that I can incorporate both flash and spin into one pane, look at Nimble and still get solutions. For me, it was a no-brainer.

This was the discovery phase. We vetted out quite a few storage arrays. This one was the one that we all came in agreement with.

We looked at Hitachi and Pure Storage. The reason why Pure Storage was removed from our list was because they only offered flash. We needed both flash and spin. 

At my previous place of employment, I mentioned to my previous boss about this solution because it would have been good at my prior place of employment. They were in a similar situation. They had flash, spinning disks, etc. However, they used Pure Storage, Hitachi, and even some Dell EMC. When you have so many different arrays, or so many different companies, that you have to work with, it is very easy when there is a problem for a vendor to point their finger at another vendor. For a better chance of a successful integration, keep the products (and vendors) down to a minimum.

I don't really have to do a whole lot to it. Plug it in, and it does its job successfully.

The performance was already good. This isn't a reactionary, but being proactive. We are doing these measures to ensure that we don't have an issue.

The biggest lesson learned is to keep using Nimble.

InfoSight. It's AI for the data center. It's very easy. It does a lot of the work for the customer. That is why HPE bought InfoSight, so they could deploy it across all their other platforms as well. It's a big game-changer. It's one of the easiest things to talk about when you're working with a customer. Customers don't want to do a whole lot of troubleshooting themselves, and with InfoSight and the whole system, it helps to deal with all these issues.

From what I've seen personally, customers that have Nimble don't really switch away from it. When newer versions come out, they usually have everything in terms of all the support and all the additional components that might be needed to help.

With the newest models, you're getting decompression and dedupe on some of the entry-level models, and this fixes a lot of issues for customers. Therefore, I am not hearing anything at this point. They just released the newest version, and so far, it's going well.

It's stable. 

It is a scalable product. They just released Gen 5 a couple weeks ago, and there's a lot of ability, depending on the need. 

They have very good, high-level support. You deal with Level 3 technicians, so that is a key takeaway. Customers don't want to be triaged, jump from here to there, and be in the line for X amount of time. They want things done, and they want them done now. With Nimble, in my experience with it, this is where they has been beneficial.

For the Nimble product line, support is very strong. There is a lot of different information, but you get a lot of support with Nimble, and Level 3 technical support is a huge benefit for customers. Especially knowing that you receive it right off the bat, as opposed to going through all the stages. Support, coupled with the InfoSight, triages a lot of their issues.

I did not set it up myself, but based on conversations with some of our solution architects, it seems like it's a straightforward setup: out-of-the-box and easy to deploy.

I have had a lot of personal success with it. Our organization has had a lot of success with it. It has a very straightforward presentation. It does the job for a lot of customers, and it's a great enterprise solution for many of them.

We use Nimble for our virtualized workloads.

We have been using it close to three years. Therefore, it was even before the HPE acquisition of Nimble that we started using it.

It has been performing well so far. Initially, we purchased Nimble for low-end or less critical workloads, and it has started to evolve. Now, it is right up there with our Tier-Two storage for CO3 and CO4 level workloads.

We have lost that dependency with traditional data center architecture where you have your storage team and server team. Now, our virtual admins are able to take control of Nimble and know how to allocate the storage, whenever it is required, thus reducing time.

The most valuable feature is InfoSight, and the ability that InfoSight gives you, from insight within your environment to what is going on at the storage layer. Also, since we use this product integrated with VMware, we are able to have a view of our virtual infrastructure segregated up to the VM level. We are able to see where the most IOPS are located, etc. Therefore, we are able to prevent and predict where things are going well or badly.

The solution that I have is a hybrid, not a full flash. The hybrid version could be improved.

Stability has not been an issue at all. We have not had a major issue nor downtime which has occurred with Nimble. Whenever we have code updates, you have high availability between your controllers, which is good.

With scalability, we had to replace one of our controllers to upgrade CPU in cache. In the case of something like this, as long as the team is able to manage it within a scheduled downtime window, it is pretty simple.

Technical support is good. We recently use them. There was a bug on the latest firmware release. So, we had to call and see what was going on. There were some features that were enabled recently that were affecting read IOPS or how the way read IOPS are managed. It was simple fix. They just gave us what we needed to do and what we needed to change, then we applied the changes.

We were looking for something where the cost would not be as high as what we were used to with traditional storage arrays. Even so, it has been on par in terms of performance, even though the price was lower, with what we had with other arrays.

The initial setup was straightforward. The initial setup took a little bit over a week because we were in the learning phase. 

We have other arrays, like VNX or HDS from Hitachi. Complexity-wise, this product (Nimble) is simpler and nimbler to set up.

We recently implemented smaller Nimble boxes or arrays for an isolated environment, which was set up by me, within one or two days.

We have not quantified it. However, with the capabilities on compression, we have seen a lot of VMs running because probably 80 to 95 percent of the data is the same. Therefore, we are able to get a good compression ratio. Because of this, I think we have saved a lot compared to a traditional storage array.

We had also shortlisted EMC. We initially went with Nimble because of price, but later figured out the other benefits.

It is a good investment, especially on virtualized workloads. We have seen a lot of benefit there. We have not used it for other types of virtual workloads, both mixed workload applications and databases. 

For my new company, we bought tens of them, almost 50. Our use case is to swap out the existing FCoE infrastructure from one of the other array providers and switch to Nimble because we were having performance issues. And the use case is more for our KSN databases. We chose Nimble because we need high performance, low latency, and a good price for SSD. We PoC'ed, and they won.

It makes things less complex. It's a simple product and does what it's supposed to do.

Regarding InfoSight, I have installed eight of them out of the 50 units we bought, and we have found, with the analysis, bad drives and we have been able to figure it out ourselves.

It's easy to use, it's just like 3PAR. I made clusters of 32 hosts with 50 volumes and that took barely an hour. I scripted a lot of it, filled in the names of volumes, the names of servers. It just spit it out and ran it and it was fine.

I want it to be an active-active array. Nimble would be great as an active-active array because then everything checks out. It would give a feeling of comfort.

We've only had it for about a month so I can't really comment on the stability. It hasn't been that long.

We bought our Nimbles half-populated on the A-side, so I have scalability right there. If I wanted to add more drives, I would just populate the B-side. It scales from 9.60 all the way to 7.60 now (or is it 3.68?) - I'm not sure. That is a 4x difference. But thinking about scalability, we're getting dedupe ratios of a minimum of 15 all the way up to 700.

Tech support goes above and beyond. We had to downgrade one of them because we want to be on the stable release, not necessarily the cutting edge. I called up and they showed up and did it for me, no issues. It's pretty good.

We had 10 requirements and they filled most if not all the checkboxes, except for the active-active controller piece.

Setting up Nimble is easy. It takes five minutes. You run "Setup" and that is it. Put an IP on and it's ready to go.

Other arrays are 2x if not 3x the price.

EMC, NetApp, and Pure storage too.

Do the hard work and it pays for itself. Do a PoC and, when you check your requirements, it will fill in most of them if not all.

This solution is a nine out of 10 because it's not active-active. If it was active-active it would be a 10 because the data reduction is so good it's ridiculous.

It's an adjunct storage repository and it compliments our 3PAR solution. We currently use it as a file store for backup, file, and compute storage workloads.

As an adjunct to our 3PAR platform, which is currently at capacity, it assists us in delaying the renewal of our 3PAR. It's an additional service on top of our storage solutions.

• Scalability
• User interface
• Reporting

Something I would like to see is more clarity regarding the positioning of Nimble versus 3PAR. I am struggling with the boundaries within which these two are competing.

I can't comment on scalability just yet. I've just bought three of them, and I've got another five on order, but I am architecting it on a scale set at the moment.

I had capacity issues, and my scale-out of existing solutions was not viable, so I had to look for something new. I was forced into a Nimble purchase through an acquisition that we made, so I became familiar with the product and then decided to expand the product.

I use it as a rudimentary backup, so it's not the most effective use for the hybrid storage solution that we bought. I have bought an All-Flash for some virtual workloads, and that was quite a cost-effective solution for us.

I think good evaluation criteria include checking the scalability of the product. I also think the reporting aspect of it is very complete.

I would rate it at eight out of 10, and the reason for that is it's not as flexible a storage solution as the current versions of 3PAR.

We use Nimble to virtualize all of our applications. For the hypervisor we use VMware. We use Nimble for the storage platform for the hypervisor.

It's been performing amazingly. 

Our organization functions very similarly to how it had operated prior to Nimble, but our applications are more responsive. The time it takes to produce some reports - specifically our year-end accounting reports which, sometimes, could take a half a day to produce - now, with Nimble on the backside, with the high I/O that it has, we're finding that we're reducing the time to process these reports by up to 70 to 80 percent. It's a significant improvement.

InfoSight provides real-time reporting, it gives you information about your different volumes, how the arrays are being used, I/O, performance in general. That's where we find value in it as well.

What I have seen so far has been sufficient for our needs.

Scalability is another reason we chose to go with Nimble: upgrading to another storage array. If we need higher capacity or throughput, we can just replace controllers, we don't have to replace or forklift-upgrade the whole chassis.

I've used their technical support once. They contacted me, proactively. It was a positive experience. We were there doing some regular maintenance and accidentally pulled a 10-gig module and, while we were swapping it, and thought we had done it right, the array went offline for about 20 or 30 seconds. They let us know that there was something wrong pretty quickly. That was pretty awesome.

We were previously a Dell EqualLogic shop for some 15 years. In fact, we still have them in production. Since the acquisition of EqualLogic by Dell, the product doesn't seem to be increasing in technology as we would have hoped, as had happened previously. I had always had my eye on Nimble anyway and was waiting for the right opportunity. That opportunity came, and I already knew what I wanted. I jumped ship and we're going full speed ahead with Nimble.

We're transitioning everything over to Nimble because of the high performance we get out of it and the ease of use. From a supportability standpoint, it's a lot simpler. The Nimble people seem to detect when things have problems before we report that there's an issue.

We needed a vendor that would come in at a similar price point, which they did. But we needed to have a better way of doing disaster recovery. That was probably the primary objective, how we would handle that going forward. The way we did Snapshotting, the old Dell EqualLogic way, was somewhat bloated, took up a lot of space and required a lot of free array space. With Nimble, a lot of those limitations didn't exist. Also, obviously, compatibility with hypervisors was important, and Nimble is compatible with all of them.

We absolutely already see a return on investment. There's definitely value in it. Not only from the increase in productivity for the users using the applications that Nimble is hosting, but from an IT standpoint, expanding the volumes, regular maintenance, adding, it's just very simple to use.

We have only had it a short period of time, so it's hard to tell if it has affected our IT operation expenses yet. Maybe it has a little bit.

We did consider other vendors. Ultimately, I had had my eye on Nimble for a long time, and I had already researched it, had done my homework on it, and was just waiting for the right opportunity.

From a virtualized infrastructure standpoint, I would advise that, if you are looking for a high-performing storage array - not necessarily long-term storage because the price per gig is pretty expensive on an all-flash array. But, application performance, database performance, if you're running Exchange environments, SQL environments, If you're doing that type of stuff, then Nimble is a good match for that type of workload.

I would definitely and easily rate Nimble a 10 out of 10.

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.

Nimble is a secondary VMware environment in our organization, so it's not running mission-critical applications at this point or responsible for complex business needs.

When we initially bought it, Nimble helped improve our organization as that was when we went through and we virtualized everything. Nimble was the back-end SAN for everything.

Now that it's owned by HPE, all of my SANs are under one support organization.

I haven't thought about what I might want to see in a future release mainly because we're trying to figure out where we want to head next: if we want to go with the Synergy system or if we want to continue down the hyperconverged path.

I haven't had a service call on it for three years. I would say that is pretty good.

We were able to take on and add the second one with the first one fairly easily. The second one was actually in Cincinnati and we brought it to Arizona. We had them separated and now they're co-joined.

We haven't needed any technical support on the two Nimble SANs that we've had, for the last three years.

They're now coming up on six or seven years old. I think we got our money's worth.

I would rate Nimble an eight out of 10, with cost probably being the big factor. It was a little on the pricey side at the time that it was bought. I came in late to the game, it was already in place when I got to the company. But, going back over the documentation, it was probably a little pricey.