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.
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The latency is good."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"Nimble's support is awesome and one of the best. You sort of get a Tier 3 plus guy every time that you call, no matter if it is a Tier 0 issue. This is super helpful in case we ever have problems."
"The valuable features include encryption of data, hybrid performance, firmware updates, and overall simplicity."
"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"
"Our virtual admins are able to take control of Nimble and know how to allocate the storage, whenever it is required, thus reducing time."
"InfoSight provides real-time reporting, it gives you information about your different volumes, how the arrays are being used, I/O, performance in general."
"We have found the advantage of it is the easy, rapid setup, but also that it is very easy to manage."
"The performance and the processor are good."
"We use InfoSight predictive analytics. It helps us from a performance perspective by identifying potential bottlenecks."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
"It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution."
"Technical support is good."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"The software layer has to improve."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"It is on the expensive side."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"The solution could improve by having more granularity. For example, having the ability to go deeper into specific IO channels or specific latency issues that can happen would be a benefit. HPE has this ability on their side but it would be useful to have it on our side."
"HPE Nimble Storage could be improved with some critical application or servers."
"I really would like to see synchronous replication. This is something that when we have multiple arrays in our environment and being able to do something like a zero RPO."
"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."
"I would like to see the network portion of the product improve, especially with some of the things which are coming out from Aruba and HPE. Both are innovating more of an automated networking. I would like to see our Nimble meld into that and do some automated networking."
"The most difficult part about Nimble was the fact that it didn't have a standard length."
"When sizing the array based on requirements the option to add more network cards for throughput would be something to help clients."
"HPE does not have suffficient storage."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"The file functionality could be better."
"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."
"Automation could be simplified."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server."
HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 117 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.
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