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.
"This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds."
"The scalability is good."
"The most valuable feature is its upgradeability."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster."
"InfoSight is helpful because it is proactive support."
"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. It's AI for the data center. It's very easy, it does a lot of the work for the customer... InfoSight and the whole system, help them to deal with troubleshooting."
"This solution has given us reliability that is evident by the fact that it has been running for five years with virtually no hiccups."
"Performance, reliability, InfoSight, the ability to upgrade the O/S on the SAN without taking it down, and cost."
"The solution's uptime is fantastic. It's 100 percent. In addition, Nimble's storage capacity efficiency is very effective."
"The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs."
"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."
"This solution is very stable."
"The technical support for this solution is good. They used to help us when the motherboard of Power Systems broke. Their response times are really fast."
"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is compression."
"At the FlashSystem level, customers are especially fond of multi-tier and distributed rate systems, particularly the dynamic rate six arrays."
"The performance of the All-Flash System is very good. There is more enhanced performance and data production in the solution, which I appreciate."
"The installation is nice and easy."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable."
"The price of the solution can improve."
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"I would like to have support available in Spanish."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"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."
"The most difficult part about Nimble was the fact that it didn't have a standard length."
"The stability can be improved."
"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."
"We have had some stability issues with one array which has happened twice during subsequent software updates but is due to a bad Postgres database."
"There should be faster interfaces."
"I would like deduplication by default on all the volumes. I still don't understand (or know why) dedupe isn't enabled for the templates out-of-the-box. We have to go in and manually enable it each and every time."
"The solution requires a higher availability."
"Our model does not support compression or deduplication."
"The design is a little old-fashioned and could be updated. The rack is very primitive and designed in an older style."
"There could be some extra features added."
"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."
"I have looked at a few pages of a report I download and I saw a graph there regarding software-defined vendors. IBM is not in a good position on this graph. I know that they are working very hard on this, to make it much better and to get to a level where it's not only hardware but also software to provide a complete solution."
"Our customers have raised concerns about the limitations of the FlashSystem 5200 and 7300, which only offer a 32-gigabyte connection."
"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."
"The product needs to improve their scalability."
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, Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, VMware vSAN and NetApp AFF, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 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.