HPE Nimble Storage vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Feb 22, 2023

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.

  • Ease of Deployment: Both products were described as easy and straightforward to deploy by their reviewers.
  • Features: HPE Nimble Storage is a stable and scalable product with the most useful features for management, deduplication, compression, data mirroring, and backups. The biggest drawback of the product is the lack of several important features, including an active-active controller, auto-fix, and a dynamic alerting system on storage. Reviewers described Pure Storage FlashArray as an easy-to-use product with valuable features for snapshots and management, deduplication, and data compression. The solution needs to increase the amount of storage it offers and improve the features for reporting, replication, and data reduction.
  • Pricing: Users’ estimation of HPE Nimble Storage's price varies, depending on the licensing that they use. The prevailing opinion is that this is a high-end solution. Reviewers of Pure Storage FlashArray like its licensing model but describe the product as expensive.

  • Service and Support: The customer and technical support of both HPE Nimble Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray are rated as good, responsive, and knowledgeable.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE Nimble Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashArray Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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 initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward.""It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems.""It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good.""The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes.""What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate.""The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature.""The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pros →

"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""We like the performance.""InfoSight is a valuable feature.""This solution has given us reliability that is evident by the fact that it has been running for five years with virtually no hiccups.""The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies.""Even through upgrades, there is no downtime, not even a hiccup for users.""The most valuable feature is the management of Nimble Storage, InfoSight. This is like a cloud. That's really a very nice feature. I think that's the only reason to buy Nimble Storage.""InfoSight, for sure, has been the best feature so far."

More HPE Nimble Storage Pros →

"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management.""The solution offers amazing performance.""It allows engineers to focus on other things rather than doing the more manual tasks. It automates tasks, so the ease of use is extreme. It simplifies the storage.""We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us.""It worked flawlessly.""Non-disruptive upgrades: You can upgrade at anytime without worry.""I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases.""The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Pros →

Cons
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage.""I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center.""It is on the expensive side.""The UI for this solution needs to be improved.""We need better data deduplication.""We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI.""Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient.""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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Cons →

"Nimble Storage could increase its flexibility by adding more protocol options. Nimble mainly uses fibre channel protocols, whereas many other storage arrays support fibre channel, iCSI, and NFS protocols.""An area that needs improvement is extending the life of the device after five years.""It would be ideal if all these enterprise-class high-performance products would come at a cheaper price.""I would like to see SSL Certification.""The quality of technical support depends on which member of the support team you speak with.""The solution requires a higher availability.""We face challenges with hardware delivery.""The solution’s stability could be better. The tool’s pricing is high and depends on the partner."

More HPE Nimble Storage Cons →

"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM.""Currently, the solution fails to support file screening.""There are a lot of things to improve.""They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable.""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 would like to see data tiering to AWS.""The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them.""The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
  • "We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
  • "With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
  • "Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
  • "As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
  • "They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."
  • "Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
  • "The licensing is on a yearly basis."
  • More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "From a price/performance perspective, Nimble simply can’t be beat. From a TCO perspective, the stability alone pays for itself."
  • "Competitive. No licensing. Since everything is included."
  • "It is expensive, but it is worth the “uptime”."
  • "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."
  • "It is very pricey. You pay for what you get, and this storage solution is great. It is well worth the cost."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "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... Nimble fills a need for performance within a budget that is in the sub-million dollar range."
  • More HPE Nimble Storage Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
  • "There is always room for negotiation."
  • "The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
  • "It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
  • "For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
  • "We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
  • "It is a cheaper solution."
  • "Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover… more »
    Top Answer:I would rate the solution as an eight out of ten in terms of costliness.
    Top Answer:There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class… more »
    Top Answer:HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one,… more »
    Top Answer:HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. The… more »
    Top Answer:If a ransomware or enterprise-level attack happens, my infrastructure remains totally secure. If any virtual machine… more »
    Top Answer:Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure… more »
    Top Answer:We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
    Top Answer:We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
    Nimble Storage
    Learn More
    Overview

    Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

    HPE Nimble Storage is a highly effective All-Flash Storage Array solution that aims to enable organizations to reliably store and access their data. Organizations across a wide variety of industries trust Nimble Storage to assist them with all of their data storage-based needs. It both tracks all of the IT architecture that an organization uses and protects that architecture from a variety of digital threats.

    HPE Nimble Storage Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy HPE Nimble Storage include:


    • Increased security. Nimble Storage provides organizations with powerful layers of protection. It leverages predictive analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to keep businesses from suffering harm related to emerging threats. The AI and ML software identifies threats before they can threaten a user’s data.


    • Reduced costs and increase profits. Businesses that deploy Nimble Storage find that their overhead costs end up being significantly reduced by up to 49%. One of the reasons for this is that Nimble Storage uses a “pay as you go” subscription model which means that users never pay for more storage than they actually need.


    • Ease of use. Nimble Storage is simple for administrators to utilize. They can install it without any kind of outside assistance. It is also simple for the average administrator to manage without specialized training.



    HPE Nimble Storage Features


    • Artificial intelligence. The backbone of Nimble Storage’s IT infrastructure is its AI software. The HPE InfoSight feature makes it so that administrators don’t need to make guesses when managing their data storage. It offers users suggestions as to what they can do to improve their storage performance.


    • Scaling. Nimble Storage gives users the ability to scale their data storage so that it appropriately meets their needs. They can both “scale up” or increase the sheer amount of data that they can store at a given time and “scale out” or increase their ability to perform effectively.


    • Hybrid storage. Nimble Storage has the ability to store data both on the cloud and on-premises so as to meet an organization’s storage requirements. Its multi-cloud feature enables users to seamlessly manage all of their data storage and utilization operations with ease.


    Reviews from Real Users

    HPE Nimble Storage is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its ease of use and its powerful InfoSight analytics feature.

    Andrew B., Head Of Information Technology at Zambia National Building Society, writes, “It's a very easy solution. Whenever I have a question, I find they have already provided a solution for it.”

    Prataparao D., Technical Solution's Consultant for HPE Storage Devices at Karvy Innotech, says, “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.”

    Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that  prevents data loss.

    Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray

    Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:

    • A much higher level of speed than similar pieces of technology. Pure Storage FlashArray maximizes the speed at which data can be transferred while at the same time minimizing system latencies that might slow the transfer down. Additionally, it offers users quick memory read and data access speeds.

    • A higher bang for your buck in terms of the storage capabilities you get for the money you pay. They are smaller in size than more standard storage technologies, but they offer flash memory, which enables users to store larger amounts of data than the current standard.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution. 

    PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."

    PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."

    Sample Customers
    Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
    Ace Relocation, Atkins Nutritionals, Berkeley Research Group, Canadian International School, City of Hot Springs, Clackamas County, Corona-Norco Unified School District, Ideal Integrations, Linear Technology, P&O Maritime, Retail Apparel Group (RAG), Virtual Radiologic
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Comms Service Provider15%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization54%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Government4%
    Manufacturing Company4%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization31%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise37%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise60%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise34%
    Large Enterprise32%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise62%
    Large Enterprise25%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise42%
    Buyer's Guide
    HPE Nimble Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashArray
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Nimble Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    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 Pure Storage FlashBlade. See our HPE Nimble Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashArray 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.