HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

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.

I feel most IT consultants, traditionally, would consider Nimble a mid-line or a starter-line, but I feel that they operate in an enterprise-class. I believe that especially their All Flash Arrays that came out, that was their new adaptation from their hybrid. We use an AF5000 in our environment, and we're getting almost 20-to-one performance compared to what we had with our traditional legacy stack, the EMC VMAX 10K.

I think HPE is headed in the right direction. From what I know, their management is actually putting Nimble on the forefront to be the leader, and I think that's where it belongs. To stay ahead of the game, they need to put Nimble in front and stay there, and ride that horse throughout.

It is stable for us, from a hardware standpoint.

We have been fortunate enough to deal with still with the Nimble engineers and not had to transfer over to HPE. Now if you were to ask me about the HPE support on the SimpliVity stack, I would have to say "failure to deliver."

It was actually one of the bleeding edge technologies we reviewed over the legacy stack that we were dealing with traditionally. We used EMC in the past from a spindle and, at that point, we didn't feel EMC was adequate to fulfill our needs. So we looked at Nimble from price and technology points of view and it met everything, all of our reviews and all of our requirements.

The setup was very, very simple. When we got our AF5000, no kidding, we had it up in production within two hours. If we were to take the similar setup, with the EMC VMAX, it took us over three months. Big difference.

The return on investment for us has been a tremendous asset. Before, we were on the legacy stack with the EMC and we just weren't getting our nightly batch jobs done on time, and that was having to run throughout the day. With Nimble, we have actually reduced that window from 12 hours to six hours, so we got a 50 percent return on investment, right off the bat.

I am actually here, at the HPE Discover 2018 conference, to find out what they plan on doing with Nimble in the future. We're also a user of the SimpliVity stack and I didn't feel that the roadmap for that has played out. We're here to see how the Nimble is going to play out. I'm very interested because we're coming up on a refresh cycle and we want to know whether we want to go down that path or not.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. I'm not being biased by any means. It checks all the boxes for us.

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.

It is storage for our VMware vSphere servers. It is also a destination for some Commvault backups and replications. We use it for a number of things.

It has been three years, and the performance has been great. We have bought eight more since buying the first one.

In our organization, when people say "I need a new server," I say, "I have the space."

• Zero downtime
• Very easy installation
• Easy upgrades

My version does not have dedupe, it has compression. I know that they have dedupe now. I just need to buy it. 

I would like to see native network attached storage (NAS) functionality. Our customers are looking for NAS, and Nimble can't give it to them.

I have added expansion shelves on several of them. It is simple to do. You plug it in, you attach two cables, then you press one button, like "Add", and that is all you have to do, which is wonderful.

Technical support is very good. When I call, I get a top-tier guy right away. I do not call very often, but if I have a question, such as, how to tear apart this array and add it to this one over here, they tell me right away. It is great.

One of the sales guys was aggressive and he met with me several times. We were, frankly, very impressed and very surprised. He said, "How about if you try it out?" and I said, "Yes." It was try-before-you-buy, and it worked.

Previously, we had some HPE P4500 LeftHand network devices which were getting old. We switched because needed a hardware refresh and more capacity.

The setup was approximately an hour-long process, almost like a one-button process. It was just so easy. Compared to most things that I have ever installed, it was simple and amazingly easy.

The first two that I bought were incredibly expensive, compared to the last five to seven that I have bought. The price has come way down, and it has been a year or so since we bought one.

We thought about the HPE 3PAR, but it seemed to be pricey. Frankly, Nimble came in and sold us on their solution. The 3PAR guy did not really make a strong sales presentation. He just said, "Trust me, it's good." My reaction was, we can't just trust you. Whereas, the Nimble guy told us the ins and outs of it and gave us all the details.

Try it out. You will love InfoSight, their online viewing tool, it is a wonderful addition. HPE thought so too, so they bought it and are putting it in everywhere. It is great, no downtime, with no care and feeding from my point of view. It just works.

It has surpassed all of our needs, it has been great. I need to buy more now, I am almost out of capacity. I would give it an unqualified 10 out of 10.