We performed a comparison between HPE Nimble Storage and IBM FlashSystem based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both solutions received high marks from reviewers. IBM has an edge in this comparison due to the feedback it received for its speed and innovation.
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"InfoSight has helped us resolved an issue where the snapshots were growing too big."
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"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."
"We have seen our average latency go from four milliseconds to point four. Therefore, we are getting 10 times better performance down to the end user on everything. We have seen an increase in our IOPS by ten times."
"InfoSight has identified controller failures or performance issues."
"There are a lot of redundancies in all the right areas, so it is pretty stable."
"HPE Nimble Storage uses the InfoSight platform and it is useful because we can identify the faults and can analyze the performance. It has many other features. This feature is the best that I have observed from HPE Nimble Storage."
"IBM FlashSystem is the best solution for storage virtualization."
"The most valuable features are flexibility and performance."
"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."
"IBM FlashSystem is a flexible solution with plenty of features."
"The performance monitoring feature is useful as it can report in 15 minute intervals by hour, day, week, month, or by a custom date range."
"The ability to create LUNs and modify them are the most valuable features of this solution."
"IBM FlashSystem is a stable solution."
"This solution is really user friendly. It also offers good performance and is highly reliable."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"It is on the expensive side."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"The backup solution that they are using now probably has not been deduped."
"HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high, making it one of its downsides."
"The solution that I have is a hybrid, not a full flash. The hybrid version could be improved."
"I want to see the full integration with OneView. I know they have started it, but I haven't had a chance to look at and evaluate it."
"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."
"A feature that would be a nice addition to the next release would be a filer option. A filer option so that you could connect the sim or NFS or chips like NetApp does for NAS functionality."
"We face challenges with hardware delivery."
"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."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It takes a lot of time to study the product and it's a little complicated in general."
"The generic functionality of IBM FlashSystem, IBM always dismisses using file share or sharing protocols inside their storage hardware, and they only focus on the block-level storage."
"Their technical support needs improvement in terms of reachability for the clients and response times. They should be more responsive and have more online platforms for support. They should make more technical information available online. There could be some kind of documentation community."
"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."
"The customer's expectations are what they get on the cloud, they're expecting even in the on-premises deployments, going forward."
"It is slightly more expensive, however, it all depends on your supplier."
"When you provision a datastore auto-format takes a long time"
"A big area for improvement is that the data reduction pool feature is not recommended for use in a production environment because it has stability and performance issues."
HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 119 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. HPE Nimble Storage is rated 9.0, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage writes "Beneficial management software, straightforward installation, and good support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera and NetApp AFF, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF and Dell PowerMax NVMe. See our HPE Nimble Storage vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.