HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

They could probably improve an organization with just about anything. It is all a matter of ease of use, ease of the implementation, etc. From that perspective, I would like to think it has been able to accomplish what people want done in an easier way, so they can get other stuff done.

• The all-flash arrays, today people really want them. 
• Their hybrid stuff is great. 
• They do a good job of helping people do storage in a very simple way.

There are customers who want to do some different things with the Microsoft Resilient File System. There are some customers who want to do different types of connectivity. I do not know if I would call that an improvement, necessarily, because if you want that, you should get a different product.

We have not had any issues whatsoever from our customer base. 

I have heard of one customer who had a catastrophic failure. I do not know if it was caused by the product or something they did. From our perspective, the product is very stable.

It fits everywhere. It just depends on what the customer is trying to accomplish. If you are somebody who needs 30 petabytes of storage at rest, it is probably not the right thing to do. If you are somebody who is trying to grow a virtualization implementation of some sort, and you just need storage which keeps growing, that is where it should go. We have used this product in all of those environments, and we have also used different products at the really big end.

They did something very well that most people fail at, they created raving fans! The way they did that was by creating a good product, but more importantly, they created a tech support who supports more than just their product. If you called in and you had VMware trouble, most people would say, "That is a VMware problem," but they would get a guy on the phone who knew what was going on with VMware and help you. 

That was the number one thing which made us approve of it. After that, it was just their innovation; their continuing to just keep up with everything. 

Since they were acquired by HPE, I cannot speak too much about the technical support. They did have everything down better than anybody else. That was what drew us to them.

If you are a super small company, the product is probably not right for you. It is out of your price range. Anything from mid-SMB up to enterprise, it is absolutely the right product.

I am giving it a 10 out of 10 because I can't think of a reason why I would not. The product is good and always has been.

This is the SAN for our network. We house all of our network files here, as well as our virtual machines.

Nimble Storage is a great storage solution. It provided us a lot insight on the growth of our storage.

InfoSight: It lets us see what we might have to prepare for in the future. This feature has been a big help, especially since we have been recently looking to move on as our contract is almost up.

It is very pricey. You pay for what you get, and this storage solution is great. It is well worth the cost.

It's central SAN storage for all of our production and test data. It's fairly fundamental to our business. As a law firm, we have vast amounts of data that have to be incredible secure. It underpins the delivery of all of our services.

It's performing very well. We've had it for three years. It's exceeded all expectations since we had it.

It has totally taken away a layer of time and effort, management-wise, from two engineers to give that time back into developing more solutions. It has provided us essentially with a platform to go away and be more creative, knowing that that is stable and can do whatever we chuck at it.

Two things. 

• One is their support. You always get through to somebody who knows exactly what they're talking about. 
• The fact that once you've bought, any updates are just part of your subscription, so you don't have to buy add-ons for new features. You're continually adding value to it.

More reporting is probably the only thing that is really lacking. It would be helpful to go to the business and say, "This is how we've evolved with our solution, and this is why we need more." Being able to put forward a business case with data to back it up, essentially.

It's purely as and when we get to the point where, we're either on a refresh, or we just need more capacity, or performance, then it's something to take to the business as proof.

We haven't really had any issues with stability. 

We have had an issue we were trying to resolve, but the support with Nimble is fantastic. They were able to fix it in a very short amount of time. That was very early on, and ever since then it's been incredibly stable.

Scalability is very good. We've scaled over the course of three years. We've bought extra shelves, extra controllers. It's just very easy to do. Just plug and play. Plug it in and off you go, pretty much.

I was involved in the initial setup. We had a sales engineer come in, but he pretty much sat there and said, "Click here, click there." It was incredibly easy to set up.

We had an incumbent storage provider which was also tendering; one of the bigger storage providers. But we were a bit put out by their ability to provide us with any real reason to stay with them. They didn't seem to have any innovation going on, and their lack of ability to actually support and help us with issues was a factor.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that vendor's ability to support its platform into the future. Also, a track record of actually delivering a solution.

Nimble, when we went with them they were clearly a new company, but they clearly had marketed their product incredibly well, and knew what they were talking about. That was very obvious.

I give it a 10 out of 10, absolutely. I've worked with a lot of technologies and this, by far, outshone any other technology that I've ever used before; their ability to deliver, and ability to support their solution.

I'd say in the market of flash storage, there are quite a lot of vendors out there. Just take your time and don't rush into picking a storage supplier, just because a price looks good. At the end of the day, it underpins everything that you do, particularly if it's your production platform. Just take your time and actually consider your requirements properly.

It's given us more time to do the important things, less time worrying about SANs and failures and picking up the pieces. It just works. 

• Reliability
• Monitoring
• Support is brilliant

This is a tricky one, really. It does everything we would want from a SAN. It doesn't make the drinks, but all we're looking for is performance and reliability, and it does that.

There hasn't been any downtime that wasn't self-inflicted. We ran out of at space once. We didn't ignore the warnings, but we didn't do anything about the warnings. But it's been perfectly reliable on its own.

We started with a single unit, four years ago we bought another unit; then a more powerful unit about 18 months later, because we had a merger; we bought another system about 18 months ago and then a disk shelf about two months ago. So yes, scalability has been fine.

They know the product inside out, but they are also really good at the ancillary bits, like VMware. You can ring them up with something that's potentially not even a Nimble problem, and you'll get somebody that is really, really good. Best support that we have on anything, really.

In the past we've always gone for secondary and tertiary units, so it's kind of been starting from scratch. This time, the disk shelf, we haven't done it yet, but it's supposed to be as simple as plugging it in and clicking on go. Hopefully, it will be.

Firstly, we get pretty good support from HPE on it, in terms of leads. So that's valuable by definition.

The quality of the service and management tools let us do things like contractual guarantees for storage performance for customers. That's something we couldn't do before.

It's a fairly simple-to-manage platform. We had a situation in the past where we had more storage platforms than we had storage engineers. We've managed to cut that down, which is good. 

It is cost-effective, which is important for a service provider, because you're competing with hyper-scale providers who do things at extremely large scale, who tend to kill you on price if you're not careful. 

I'd like to see more granular quality of service rules. So things like: I think currently there's not much room for maximum IOPS, but there's not an option for minimum IOPS for a given volume.

It's less about giving us more features and more about giving us ways to contractually guarantee the features that are already there. So something like performance is the classic one. It's more valuable to me to be able to contract the performance that's there, rather than have a new way of doing things, because customers are not interested in signing up for the "best effort, maybe" services anymore.

It's stable, absolutely. We haven't had any challenges with downtime or anything like that yet. We did a pretty long technical proof of concept beforehand, so we were pretty confident when we purchased it that it would be fit for purpose.

Scalability is an interesting issue, because most of our customers grow organically - 10, 20 percent range. But we have deployed it for single, large tenants without too many challenges. 

We have a government customer who wants to buy storage on demand. Basically, they want the commercial model of the public cloud and absolutely nothing else. Everything else they want to be to their specifications, and that's worked out quite well for them. They can add 40 terabytes, 100 terabytes at a time without too much of a challenge.

We replaced 3PAR with Nimble.

Everything is complex for us because we're an MSP with so many different customers who all have different, weird requirements. Nothing is ever simple for us, but Nimble was no more complex than anything else we have had to deploy for our customers.

We deployed Nimble about nine months ago, across all of our managed services customers. We've got about six arrays, about 400 terabytes of data provisioned on Nimble at the moment.

When we look to work with a vendor like HPE or any other vendor, there are  a couple of things that are important to us. Support is the big one. Is it onshore? Is it local? Are they going to care, basically?

The other one that's important is, what can we do together in the market? One of the competitors that we evaluated in the proof of concept talked a lot about what we'd do in the market, and then made press releases with my competitors, contradicting what they were saying the day before. So trustworthiness, when it comes to co-marketing and that kind of thing; that they're going to support us. Don't get me wrong, you don't expect to be the only partner they work with. But you want them to at least be honest about "here's what we can do together, here's what we can't."

The biggest thing from when they have replaced the old storage is that they have not had to touch it. That once it is set up it, it dynamically understands what data is being stored on it and where to store it, because they have got a flash array at the front, then obviously the standard style of storage at the back. There was not a lot of configuration needed to make it understand what their business was about and how it worked. It was just a big plus that once it was in, they more or less could forget about it.

It allowed them to concentrate on other projects that were obviously important for growing their business rather than having to worry about managing the storage, which is what they used to do with all their old storage.

Before HPE bought Nimble, we had a couple of customers that use it quite extensively, not just for storage of data, but also as their backup solution as well. So, we have found the advantage of it is the easy, rapid setup, but also that it is very easy to manage. 

Their remote management and understanding when things are starting to go wrong and their ability to fix them before the customer even knows, this has been a big positive when a customer makes the decision to go with Nimble.

The backup solution that they are using now probably has not been deduped. I think this is probably sort of one area that the customer is a little bit concerned about. It is a timing issue for them, though it is still working at the moment. It is just not giving them enough header space that they thought they would have because the dedupe does not seem to be working as well as it could. So, it is something that needs to be reviewed and to make sure the customer has not clicked a certain feature. 

I know for a fact that once they get in touch with HPE or Nimble, they will obviously look at the box remotely, see where there are potentially fine tunings, and if it is just a question of the customer having time to allow them to come online and review it, hopefully it will get solved.

Apart from that, everything else has been positive.

The occasional disk here and there goes. However, they turn up and swap the disk before you even know it. So, stability has been very good in that sense.

We have added a couple of shelves over the years to the product already. We still have capacity to add one more shelf to it, but obviously the product changes and develops all the time and allows the expansion, then you still have the ability to pull out the main engines and replace the controller cards on the actual box itself. You know you have a growth area forward in the product. It is not as if you have to throw it away and start again, when you hit the capacity. That was another advantage, it was easy to upgrade.

I can only really sort of comment when it was Nimble, because obviously HPE has only owned them for a few months now. From both a pre-sales and post-sales, I have always found them really good. They are very professional, know their products, know what they do, and very informative in terms of keeping the customer updated. For me, it is always just been a positive, which would be why I would always recommend them on to other clients, because of that.

Our customers have been looking at 3PAR, but:

• It is too expensive.
• It was not automated enough, in the way that Nimble is.

It is sort of one of those decisions that it is quite easy to make in terms of the Nimble solution for money for storage size regarding which is more cost effective. Also, the ability to set it up and more or less leave it alone to run itself. It is a big positive. 

It's not that expensive and it really brings the latency down; that was the promise from their end and it really did.

Since we are using virtual desktop environments, we had to deal with boot storms and we solved this issue with Nimble.

For me, this product has everything I need in there. What could be improved is performance monitoring, i.e., if it can get even better than what it is now, I will be happy. For example, there should be an exact drilling down to any workload/any virtual machine/any identified issue. So, if an issue appears and there is latency, there could be a faster or easier way to know what the reason is and how we can resolve it with Nimble.

15 months

no issues

The product is very stable.

We are considering to scale it. We did consider it once and we might consider in the future as well. I had the impression that we can easily scale it.

very good

very good

We were using a different solution. I was visiting a specific software house conference (the software that we were using then), they had Nimble there and I was really interested; I asked them questions and then, eventually, it turned out into a project.

While selecting a vendor, I want to be sure that we are getting good value for money and having good performance; for me, that's the main priority.

The setup was very easy, it was a matter of a couple of hours.

the vendor came here at the very beginning and set all up

I looked at the traditional products out there and did a comparison with Nimble as well. For example, we compared EMC Storage with NimbLe and I also did consider SimpliVity, at the time but for this specific workload, it turned out that Nimble had the best approach.

Absolutely, try it out. For me, it was very easy because Nimble offered us to try and buy. They just came, set up the box, and I had a whole month's time to try it; it worked perfectly. For me, it was really easy.

It delivers High IOPS, but more important, low latency. This is the most important part for our usage.

• VMware integration, why is pretty self-explanatory.
• Nimble offers better VMware integration then EMC does.
• Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environment.
• Fibre Channel support

Nimble offers InfoSight, which in turn offers VMVision. This is a terrific feature. You can immediately see which VM causes the highest IOPS and which has the most latency. The downside of this feature is that you can only see it on InfoSight and the data is always a few hours old. It would be awesome if this was in the dashboard of the Nimble and shown as live data.

Also, Nimble requires its DNS to work in order to interface with VMware vCenter is a little thorn in my eye, but I am being nitpicky here.

No issues.

No issues.