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.
"Support has been helpful."
"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."
"Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular..."
"The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"This solution is very scalable."
"It is easy to deploy and it's all-flash, so it's very fast."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"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."
"I really like the form factor, which is nice and compact and small."
"It's very stable and fast, and I am very happy with the deduplication. It saves a lot of space, which is great."
"Updates are very easy to do when the customer is connected to the internet."
"InfoSight has helped us resolved an issue where the snapshots were growing too big."
"I use InfoSight quite a bit. It works well. It allows you to get some insight into what's happening in your environment immediately, instead of having to send things off and having them analyzed and sent back to you."
"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."
"The scalability is straightforward."
"The maintenance service and support from IBM is very good."
"We've found the solution to be very stable so far."
"It's a mature product. It's like a BMW that evolves consistently."
"They have a virtualization feature and, even if you do not want to buy that feature, you can have it as a trial for two to three months. If you have another brand of storage from another company, you can use this tool to transfer all your data from the old system to the new Storwize system, which really shortens the migration time."
"The most crucial feature of IBM FlashSystem is compression."
"IBM FlashSystem has been stable in our operations."
"IBM FlashSystem is a stable solution."
"Stability-wise, this solution is fine."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial."
"The dashboard can be improved."
"They keep talking about doing one-to-many replication. This is what we'd like to see, just to help with data replication."
"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 solution needs to be an active-active controller."
"The solution requires a higher availability."
"You could argue that it would be preferable if everything were cheaper in order to save taxpayer money."
"More reporting is probably the only thing that is really lacking. It would be helpful to go to the business and say, "This is how we've evolved with our solution, and this is why we need more." Being able to put forward a business case with data to back it up, essentially."
"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."
"Their technical support needs improvement in terms of reachability for the clients and response times. They should be more responsive and have more online platforms for support. They should make more technical information available online. There could be some kind of documentation community."
"The solution is quite expensive. That's one of the downsides to using it."
"With regards to the IBM V7000 storage system, where we have multiple tiers of storage, a heat map would show I/O distribution across the tiers of storage."
"AHV is Acropolis Hypervisor – A relatively new Hypervisor, robust and stable as VMware vSphere, has built-in advanced analytics and powerful operations, Self Service Portal and components for DevOps included, managed by a single pane of glass (Prism) via HTML5 and it is free of charge – That is why Nutanix is so advanced and revolutionary."
"Additional licenses might be added for the fundamental licenses, such as those for copying and flash copies."
"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."
"Cloud file sharing is an area that needs improvement."
"It is slightly more expensive, however, it all depends on your supplier."
HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 117 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.