HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

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.

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."