HPE Nimble Storage Previous Solutions
TG
Thomas Godden
Senior Storage Specialist, Digital Systems at Shaw Communications
We have used NetApp previously and our management preferred to use HPE Nimble Storage.
View full review »TN
TariqNazir
Network Security Specialist with 10,001+ employees
We've also used Dell storage solutions. They were not pure storage, however.
View full review »I have mostly worked with HCI solutions in the market, which includes HPE Alletra dHCI.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
HPE Nimble Storage
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about HPE Nimble Storage. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.
The other product we used was no longer available, so we switched to the next-best solution.
View full review »EH
Principa0182
Principal Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
We had 10 requirements and they filled most if not all the checkboxes, except for the active-active controller piece.
View full review »We have previously used many similar solutions, such as IBM and Pure Storage. I have found HPE Nimble Storage to be a better solution.
View full review »AS
Atul Sohla
Operations Manager at Nuvollo Corp.
We previously used a different solution and knew we needed to change our solution to provide storage for our virtualization. The storage solution we had previously could not provide this and so it was not adequate. It was a rented system from another company and we were not happy with the performance.
View full review »RP
reviewer1026159
Assistant Circuit Executive for Information Technology at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Previously, we were using Dell EqualLogic's PS series. We have since removed that from our environment and moved to another storage platform. We switched to the other platform in late 2020. We switched to HPE Nimble Storage.
View full review »JM
James Mercer
Director of Information Technology at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees
We used NetApp. We switched due to performance and manageability requirements. NetApp was simply an average performer, and managing it was difficult.
View full review »SJ
Sanjeev JHA
IT Manager at Harvard University
We had legacy storage and my team recommended that we had to move to something new.
View full review »We have Lenovo SAN Storage, but it's very slow and is not recommended. The deduplication is not smooth as well. Nimble is the best solution.
View full review »TR
Systems667
IT Infrastructure & Systems Manager at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
We did not have a previous solution.
View full review »HG
SrManagea63e
Sr Manager, Computing at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
We were looking for something where the cost would not be as high as what we were used to with traditional storage arrays. Even so, it has been on par in terms of performance, even though the price was lower, with what we had with other arrays.
View full review »CY
VPTech3691
Vice President Tech Operations at Ten-X, LLC
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.
View full review »CP
Christian Poortvliet
Head of IT at One
When it came to renewal, the requirements are based on customer demands and projects.
View full review »RB
ITInfrasbde5
IT Infrastructure Manager at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
The existing SAN was no longer a fit for purpose.
View full review »No, we are a Nimble shop with nine arrays now.
View full review »JT
Jeff Tedform
Senior Network Administrator at a university with 201-500 employees
The former CIO hadn't upgraded anything in almost 20 years. Everything that we had was completely outdated. We wanted to move to a more efficient solution for our on-premise stuff. We were also looking into things with the cloud, but that doesn't have a lot to do with Nimble, per se. We just needed to modernize.
We had all on-premise bare metal servers. We got rid of it four years ago, when they were still doing their backups to tape. This is why when we went to the Nimble. We cut our use of space down to about 25 percent.
I have experience with a few different solutions. Nimble is quite a large solution that runs well without errors. One of its competitors, NetApp, is good but hard to configure. You need to really be an expert to configure it. With Nimble, you don't have to be overly technical.
I've also worked with Huawei devices in the past as well.
View full review »GB
reviewer1130226
Service Desk Manager at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We did not use another solution prior to this one.
View full review »We were using the NetApp solution beforehand. We switched because, one, obviously, we need to have simplicity in the solution; number two, the cost per unit should be attractive so that we can have good business models in place; obviously, the reliability and the interoperability with the product partners, like Cisco and the other compute and network platforms.
We had quite a few issues with other platforms, but Nimble has simplified it quite a bit and they have standardized quite a bit. It is providing results both operationally and commercially. It is very economical with much improved performance.
View full review »DN
Dustin Newby
IT Director at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees
With the array we had, the maintenance contract was over and it was going to cost us a lot to continue support on it. Plus, we were having a lot of latency issues with it and a lot of complaints from users. We had a lot of support calls. We did a PoC on the Nimble and we were able to immediately show that it would improve our performance.
Our criteria when evaluating vendors include ease of use, something with a good management interface that doesn't require plug-ins or Java or Flash, so having the HTML5 interface was ideal. I really looked for something that would give me insight into what was happening on the array in my stack. With other arrays I've had in the past, it was really hard to pinpoint whether it was a storage issue, or a server issue, or a network issue. I also wanted an all-flash solution because I had tried some tiered storage before and it never seemed to have the data in the right tier. I had flash storage but what needed to be running fast wasn't in flash, it was on SATA and performance would take a hit.
We went with Nimble because it fit all our criteria. Also, the sales team was great and the fact that they offer free training is awesome. There are not very many vendors that do that. Doing our PoC really proved that it was the product that we needed to fill our needs.
View full review »We were using a different company before. There are actually several reasons why we decided to look at other vendors. One of which was that we had an unexpected outage with our older storage system for about 56 hours and it was significant enough that even though, we usually were loyal to that company we said, "Maybe we should start talking to other people." We brought in Nimble Storage as well as about three or four other vendors and we did a little bit of bake-off. We had conversations with the teams, asked for references and really when we started asking to put some of our workloads onto their appliance, that's when it really made a difference for us.
View full review »We used HP EVA Fiber Channel SANS before. The HP EVA SANS were starting to show their age and were very expensive to run and maintain. In addition to that, they didn’t perform as well as the current day machines.
View full review »RB
Ricardo Buysse
HPE Technical Support Manager at Servicios GZ, C.A.
Most of our clients used 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera.
View full review »CL
HeadOfIn5041
Head of Infrastructure and Operations at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
We previously used Dell EMC. We went to Nimble because of space-growth requirements.
View full review »MB
MattBonfield
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees
We were running out of space. The ability to compress and dedupe stuff with Nimble is unmatched.
Coming off old Dell EMC PowerVaults and our own custom SAN solution that that we had running with storage, it has changed our entire ecosystem dramatically with the fast access times and the 10 gig fiber coming off of it. There is just nothing like it. The access times are less than two milliseconds.
We keep our latency super low, even with 200 plus servers on it, which has really changed the ball game. Access to that data used to be a lot slower. Now, it's not, which is great.
View full review »DL
ITDirector020
Director of IT at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Many different SANs.
View full review »SR
ITManage722b
IT Manager at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
We implemented this solution because our legacy applications needed a better solution than we already had. We used to use the HP LeftHand Storage Array. Our performance has increased by approximately ten to fifteen percent.
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Rick Shantz
IT Manager at Startech Computer Accessories
We had performance issue on our previous solution (AF3000).
View full review »LH
Lee Holland
Director Of IT at Okland Construction Company, Inc.
We were previously a Dell EqualLogic shop for some 15 years. In fact, we still have them in production. Since the acquisition of EqualLogic by Dell, the product doesn't seem to be increasing in technology as we would have hoped, as had happened previously. I had always had my eye on Nimble anyway and was waiting for the right opportunity. That opportunity came, and I already knew what I wanted. I jumped ship and we're going full speed ahead with Nimble.
We're transitioning everything over to Nimble because of the high performance we get out of it and the ease of use. From a supportability standpoint, it's a lot simpler. The Nimble people seem to detect when things have problems before we report that there's an issue.
We needed a vendor that would come in at a similar price point, which they did. But we needed to have a better way of doing disaster recovery. That was probably the primary objective, how we would handle that going forward. The way we did Snapshotting, the old Dell EqualLogic way, was somewhat bloated, took up a lot of space and required a lot of free array space. With Nimble, a lot of those limitations didn't exist. Also, obviously, compatibility with hypervisors was important, and Nimble is compatible with all of them.
View full review »RD
Randy Daming
Consulting Engineer at Ameren Corporation
One of the sales guys was aggressive and he met with me several times. We were, frankly, very impressed and very surprised. He said, "How about if you try it out?" and I said, "Yes." It was try-before-you-buy, and it worked.
Previously, we had some HPE P4500 LeftHand network devices which were getting old. We switched because needed a hardware refresh and more capacity.
View full review »NR
Infrastr2c88
Infrastructure Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
We came from a spinning SAN to hybrid SAN to all-flash. We just followed that path.
We moved to all-flash because we were pushing the latency of the hybrid so far it was unusable.
View full review »We were using a different storage solution and we weren't getting the speed that we needed out of it for some of our applications. We couldn't run an SQL server on our old one. It was just too slow. We looked into 3PAR , because at the time, Nimble was not yet bought out. We looked into 3PAR , we looked into some of the bigger ones and decided that Nimble gave just as good performance for a much lower cost point.
View full review »We previously used a different product. The switch was made to gain a less-complex design for setup and administration.
View full review »We are a provider of solutions. We will place technologies where they fit.
View full review »We used to use a different storage vendor. The two main reasons we changed were the terrible levels of support we received from the previous company and the arrays' performance. The support was important because once, when we had an issue with an array, we had a six-hour outage and the issue prevented DR as well as production environments working. The support was terrible, and it took months to finally resolve the issue.
Performance-wise, the arrays we had were simply not sufficient for our growing environment and the needs of our newer larger clients coming into our infrastructure. This, coupled with the management overhead required to simply keep the plates spinning on these arrays, prompted us to find a more-reliable, better-performing partner with a better support ethos.
View full review »We had and EMC SAN in the past which took up a lot of space and required regular maintenance from a service technician including several downtimes.
View full review »Yes, the switch was made to gain a less complex design with regards to setup and administration.
View full review »LS
Larry Stewart
Director of Hosting Operations at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
We needed additional capacity and our old SAN solution was seven years old, at about end-of-life. We had been using a Dell Compellent, and it wasn't really suited for our type of workload.
View full review »CC
Christian Cipolat
Enterprise Infrastructure Architect at TAL
I had capacity issues, and my scale-out of existing solutions was not viable, so I had to look for something new. I was forced into a Nimble purchase through an acquisition that we made, so I became familiar with the product and then decided to expand the product.
View full review »We knew we needed a new solution because we needed something for restored backup.
View full review »This particular environment was all standalone servers and storage previously. Decision was made to move to shared storage to support movement from standalone servers to a VMware cluster on Cisco UCS blades.
View full review »Yes and because of the performance and abilities of the array such as encryption without purchasing new hardware.
View full review »- We had Hitachi AMS2100 SANs.
- The CS210 reduced the required rack size from 12 U to 3 U for more than double the performance.
- Price was competitive with Hitachi’s and other solutions providing similar performance, when including all licences and maintenance over a 3 years period.
- Much easier to set up and manage than all our previous SANs.
- Improved monitoring, and no extra costs for providing this.
RM
SrVpDepD10d9
Sr VP Dep Director of IT at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It was actually one of the bleeding edge technologies we reviewed over the legacy stack that we were dealing with traditionally. We used EMC in the past from a spindle and, at that point, we didn't feel EMC was adequate to fulfill our needs. So we looked at Nimble from price and technology points of view and it met everything, all of our reviews and all of our requirements.
View full review »We were using a different solution. I was visiting a specific software house conference (the software that we were using then), they had Nimble there and I was really interested; I asked them questions and then, eventually, it turned out into a project.
While selecting a vendor, I want to be sure that we are getting good value for money and having good performance; for me, that's the main priority.
View full review »LL
Lorna Liu
Product Manager at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Previously, we used Dell.
View full review »We used EMC Celerra. We switched due to the complexity of volume management and performance.
We had local SSD, PowerVault MD3200, and EqualLogic arrays. We were not happy with EqualLogic’s performance and scale, so we consolidated it all into Nimble.
View full review »I previously used a different solution, and I switched to Nimble because of its cost effectiveness, its ease of use and it is very manageable. Nimble simplified everything for me.
View full review »EMC CX4s. Better performance, better cost, reduce rack space/cooling/power. We reduced our disk latency from 12-15ms to 1-2ms.
View full review »Previously used Dell EqualLogic arrays but they were end of life.
View full review »I am also using HPE 3PAR.
I also have experience with HPE Primera, which is a better product. It's a merge of 3PAR and Nimble and it's a more stable storage solution.
If I were comparing a group of products then I would rate StorageWorks MSA a five, Nimble a seven, 3PAR an eight, Primera a nine, and StorageWorks XP a ten.
View full review »We replaced 3PAR with Nimble.
We have a slew of HPE products. Since we were a partner with Nimble prior to the acquisition, it was natural for us to use and sell their products.
View full review »CY
VPTech3691
Vice President Tech Operations at Ten-X, LLC
We used to use Sentry and we switched to Nimble. It was a Greenfield solution. When choosing a solution for storage venues, which is what I do now, the main elements have to be reliability and support. This is our game. Nimble is now a part of HPE and they just beat out the others.
View full review »Yes, Dell EqualLogic. Cost per IO and Gig. Stability.
View full review »We used NetApp before, Nimble was a better architecture for us and we receive better support than with the NetApp support team
View full review »We used to push Dell/Equallogic stuff, but the limited performance and lack of value caused us to look elsewhere.
View full review »At one point, we used NetApp. We found it expensive, especially with the storage overhead required. The Nimble product was significantly less expensive and management was simpler.
View full review »AC
Atwood Cheung
IT Contractor at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Previously, we used Compellent, but HPE Nimble Storage's performance is far better and faster. We also use Pure Storage in addition to HPE Nimble Storage as it provides more stable, faster performance and active storage on two different sides.
View full review »JA
Jigar Acharya
VP - Engineering Operations at WPG Consulting
I'm also familiar with EqualLogic.
View full review »We were on NetApp previously. It was too cumbersome to manage. Their support was atrocious, and they were really expensive.
View full review »We used NetApp. Nimble Storage is a better block storage than NetApp on every single parameter.
View full review »Yes, we were using both older equipment (HPE EVA4400) and newer equipment (HPE 3PAR). The EVA4400 is now decommissioned, thanks to our Nimble array. Greater performance and capacity are the two main reasons that we switched to Nimble.
View full review »Prior to this, we were using storage on our servers.
View full review »MA
reviewer999681
ICT Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
We were still using 3PAR storage before we had EVA Storage System. We are a very loyal HPE customer for many, many years, for ourselves and also as a vendor. We have used HPE storage for ourselves for 25 years.
We switched to Nimble Storage because of InfoSight. You can say 3PAR also had InfoSight, but it was not the same quality. It's better right now. And for us, because we have customer systems in our infrastructure, it's very important to have very high availability in our systems. We have to get SLAs, the service-level agreements.
View full review »NW
Naguib Wasef
HPE Product Manager at MAS Egypt
We also work with HPE Primera.
View full review »DG
Solution9877
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The storage that we had was going out of support. We previously used mostly HPE 3PAR. We switched to Nimble mostly because it was simpler to administer. Also, the scale that we needed in Nimble was probably better suited for us than the 3PAR systems.
View full review »We previously used EMC. Storage administration was a nightmare in regards to LUN changes.
View full review »JC
reviewer1030287
Infrastructure and IT Support Coordinator with 201-500 employees
Previous solution had many licenses for each feature, with high OPEX and manage complexity.
View full review »SY
reviewer1314750
Technical Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
Previous to this product we just used normal three-tier storage, for example, HPE, MSA, Lenovo, and so on.
View full review »- NetApp, EMC, Dell EqualLogic.
- NetApp relies on lots of disk and was a nightmare to keep up to date. Updating was a major project when it happened.
- NetApp? To complicated and the extras like snap manager for Exchange very expensive. The others? Not much experience of EMC or EqualLogic.
TN
reviewer1245675
Information Technology Operations Manager at Weber Metals
The only other product that I have experience with is Dell Compellent.
View full review »We had multiple storage solutions that simply got to their EOL.
View full review »Yes, switched for scalability and cost effectiveness of data storage/protection.
View full review »SV
reviewer1358325
Technical Specialist at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
I have worked with other similar solutions and I find that there are no big differences between them.
View full review »We were using EMC 5200. We switched because there was a forklift upgrade to EMC 5300 that cost almost three times as much compared to Nimble.
View full review »Yes, the decision was made before I joined the company, however, I believe it was due to pricing and the shift of our strategy.
View full review »We did, and we switched due to the latency, technology, and cost.
View full review »The previous solution was very complex.
View full review »This was a new project where we needed a storage solution and we evaluated Nimble among others and we decided to go with Nimble.
View full review »Previously used EMC VPLEX, VNX , XtremIO , IBM DS8800, and Storwize.
We switched because traditional SAN solutions are outdated and inefficient.
Buyer's Guide
HPE Nimble Storage
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about HPE Nimble Storage. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.