We performed a comparison between HPE Nimble Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, HPE Nimble Storage came out ahead of Pure Storage FlashArray. Although the two products have a similar ease of deployment, pricing, and quality of service and support, Pure Storage FlashArray requires more improvements in its capacities and features.
"The latency is good."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"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."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"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."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"The solution's uptime is fantastic. It's 100 percent. In addition, Nimble's storage capacity efficiency is very effective."
"HPE Nimble Storage is quick to release updates that fix bugs or problems and the failover has been good."
"This product is very easy to set up."
"The deployment is fast."
"We have found the advantage of it is the easy, rapid setup, but also that it is very easy to manage."
"The all-flash positions our organization for growth. It is much easier to use, and we do not have to worry about the I/O profile of the workloads that we putting on the array."
"Updates are very easy to do when the customer is connected to the internet."
"Performance, reliability, InfoSight, the ability to upgrade the O/S on the SAN without taking it down, and cost."
"The performance is very good."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"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."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"Web GUI should be HTML5."
"I have problems with the next servicer. For example, I have a new device and it needs to connect to Nimble."
"Pure Storages have some option, which allows us the ability to directly download that host inventory and volume report. We can receive everything directly generated from the storage itself. We do not need to use some other web browser or something. If HPE Nimble Storage could do the same it would be a benefit."
"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."
"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 is a new version of the Nimble and 3PAR systems called Alletra and they have a lot of new features."
"They keep talking about doing one-to-many replication. This is what we'd like to see, just to help with data replication."
"I would like to see SSL Certification."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 119 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. HPE Nimble Storage is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage writes "Beneficial management software, straightforward installation, and good support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera and VMware vSAN, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, IBM FlashSystem, VMware vSAN and Dell Unity XT. See our HPE Nimble Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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