HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

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.

The solution can be used for SAP HANA applications and some Linux-based databases. Our customers use it for SUSE Linux.

InfoSight is a valuable feature. It enables 24/7 monitoring and administration of our storage. Whenever there is a fault, the user will be alerted. It is a 100% customer satisfaction-based experience. Everything is on the dashboard.

The solution could reduce its price.

I have been working with the solution for the past three years.

I didn't see any failure so far.

I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten.

We have around 180 users.

I rate the product’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The intervention of the technical support is only to facilitate parts replacement. InfoSight gives the user information like predictive failure and faulty parts. The vendor is then notified about it.

The initial setup is simple. HPE makes every deployment simple and easy to integrate. It takes us two to three hours to deploy the product because everything is connected over the internet. We need internet connectivity for the deployment.

We need only one engineer to deploy the solution.

We can choose between a yearly license fee or once in three years. The solution’s pricing is reasonable for the features that it provides.

I haven't checked the latest version of Nimble yet. Maybe there will be lots of improvements after the 2019 version. It is a good solution. I recommend it. My recommendation depends on what the customer needs. Sometimes, customers overdo the specifications. Sometimes they need only SaaS-based storage.

Customers should know what they need and what applications are running on it. Then, the partners can recommend a solution accordingly. Customers should not take the specification directly to the supplier. They should ask the partners. Partners would give cost-effective recommendations.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

We use it in small business setups with 10, 15, or 20 VMs per customer. Our entire system runs on Nimble Storage, e.g., Windows Active Directory, Windows Servers, and WEP.

Everything is just faster. Though, it is not necessarily required for the deployment that we do. It just gives us a bit of that extra speed.

InfoSight has helped us resolved an issue where the snapshots were growing too big.

Speed versus storage space is the most valuable feature.

I don't think it is officially released yet, but the main reason that we chose Nimble is because of the sync rep feature. So, I would like to see that further evolve. This feature will be essential for our setups.

The stability is good. I have no issues.

The uptime is good. I can update without any downtime, so that is good.

The scalability is average. We had a unit that wasn't that old, which we couldn't extend anymore.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is good.

The technical support is awesome.

When it came to renewal, the requirements are based on customer demands and projects.

The initial setup is always easy. It was easy before it was part of HPE, so I am happy that they took this with them.

We deployed in-house.

The solution has increased performance.

Our hybrid solution could do with some more competitive pricing and more scaled-down deployments. Already, the smallest one is too much for us. We would flourish by having a smaller unit.

If you don't go cheap, it is eventually worth it. However, the initial investment is high.

We looked at Nimble and NetApp.

I have had some bad experiences previously with the performance of the NetApp units, which is the reason that we went with Nimble.

Go with Nimble if you want the best.

It is reliable, the support is good, and it provides us with good performance.

It is our primary source platform. It underlines all of our Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 applications. We use hybrid, not flash.

It has reduced the requirement to have a specialist storage engineer.

InfoSight has allowed us to centralize our management, understanding how it correlates to the array. It has identified a network issue in the network configuration of ESXi hosts. It enables us to get servers back up faster by 25 percent.

It has stabilized throughput and provided less downtime for our applications.

• Simplicity of use
• Maintenance

I would like to have integration into cloud providers, apart from HPE.

The release cycle for the firmware upgrades could be improved. They are a bit long.

It's very stable. It is 100 percent up.

It's very scalable. We can scale it up and down.

We haven't had to increase capacity.

The technical support is fantastic.

The existing SAN was no longer a fit for purpose.

The initial setup was incredibly simple. It was up and running within half an hour.

We deployed it in-house.

It has increased our performance and allowed us to expand out what we can deliver.

Definitely, give the product a go and do a PoC.

It fits my needs perfectly.

Biggest lesson learnt: Sometimes, the simplest solution is actually a complex solution.

The performance and simplicity are the most valuable features. We originally moved from NetApp, which in our opinion was an extremely complicated system to learn. It was not intuitive at all, whereas everything about Nimble Storage is intuitive, hence their name. All their online documentation is easy to read and easy to follow. All their online sales information is transparent and usually done by a third party instead of by themselves. As far as the performance, they're able to get much better performance with normal spinning disks. We've always had spinning disks in our storage solutions, but they're able to get better performance out of the typical spinning disk, just by the way they've written their software on the back-end. Then for solid-state drives, they can get better performance through read operations through the data.

One of the reasons why we had to move away from our old storage solutions was that we started to use virtual workstations. That's a solution that we wanted to move forward and we just didn't have the performance to do that with our NetApp solution. That has definitely transformed our business as far as being able to centralize all our workstations into one solution. We can also better leverage disaster recovery, because all our workstations will replicate over to our disaster recovery location.

They only use block-level storage and with NetApp, we were able to use file-level storage. That means we could leverage NFS or we could leverage SIFS and we could actually host a file server on the storage solution itself. We could do that with our NetApp solution. Right now, they only use block-level solutions, so you can only use iSCSI.

I have used this solution for almost two and half years.

I have not had stability issues with Nimble Storage.

We haven't had to scale out yet, but we would have zero issues if we needed to. They have plenty of offerings for us to do that.

I'd give technical support 5/5. When I call, I get somebody on the phone immediately. I just have to press one number to go to technical support and I immediately have somebody on the phone.

Setup was very straightforward. That was one of the things we liked about it most.

I recommend the product because of the licensing and pricing. It seems like they are flexible regarding pricing in compared to other vendors. There is really is no licensing; it's all in one. It all comes in one bundle.

We evaluated NetApp, which is our previous solution, and then we also evaluated Pure Storage.

My advice would be to use it. Just make sure whether you need to go with an all solid-state drive solution or whether you can use their hybrid solution, because there's going to be a big price difference.

The AF5000 array is the primary storage for our iManage DMS 10 document management systems. It allows the best performance for users using the system.

It has allowed us to upgrade our DMS to the latest version and reuse the older array as the DR storage for VMware SRM.  The entire DMS system performance has improved compared to the old which was on a previous generation CS260G.

Having all-flash with two banks of disk for population is great for expansion. InfoSight is always one of the best out there for array reporting and troubleshooting.

The product is great.  When sizing the array based on requirements the option to add more network cards for throughput would be something to help clients.  Product Support is best in class as always.

We have been using this solution for three to five years.

No stability issues.

No issues here and we have a full bank for disk expansion.

Customer Service:

Customer service is great and they go above and beyond to help.

Technical Support:

Technical support is second to none out there combined with Infosight. Also having technicians assigned directly to you when needed is great!

No, we are a Nimble shop with nine arrays now.

Straightforward and very easy, as always.

Implementation was in-house, done by myself.

ROI will be determined over the next year, after we go-live.

When selecting a vendor make sure to validate with the vendor that the throughput is enough. With the AF5000, it is 2GB/s write and 4GB/s read, which we are maxing out. Also, ensure to get the right amount of network cards.

Also, make sure that the specifications meet the application domain and ensure the right amount of network cards are in the array.

Nothing else was evaluated.

Nimble AF is a great platform and is only getting better. On top of that, InfoSight's great technical support makes it an easy choice.

We use the solution as VMware SRM’s database storage.

The tool’s support is feasible.

The solution’s stability could be better. The tool’s pricing is high and depends on the partner.

I have been using the solution for two to three years.

I would rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten. The solution is quite stable. We rarely have issues with storage.

The tool is almost scalable. We have one to two users for the solution.

HPE’s support is good. They respond fast.

Positive

The product’s initial setup is straightforward. The initial setup was done by HPE. We manage the solution’s storage and maintenance.

We are the solution’s integrators. 

We have seen ROI with the tool’s use.

The solution’s licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. We require one technical engineer for the product’s maintenance.

We primarily use it for storage.

The capacity for data storage and compression is good.

I would like to see some additional features included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for the past eight months.

It was on track, but I have problems with the next servicer. For example, I have a new device and it needs to connect to Nimble. 

I do not pay for it.

I would rate HPE Nimble Storage a nine out of ten.