HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

Great performance and capacity in just 3U. Volume collections with crash-consistent snapshots every 4th hour, without using up too much disk space (thanks to indexing and redirect-on-write).

Our hosting environment (VMware ESX-based) got a nice boost thanks to these products. We were able to decommission a whole rack of old FC SAN arrays (HPE EVA4400) and replace it with just a CS300 (3U). Lower disk latency and a whole lot greater IOPS values as well.

Perhaps more stability to the InfoSight VMVision feature. A couple of times last year, this feature had stop working for us.

Well, Nimble Storage have had some difficulties/interference during this year with their predictive analytics service InfoSight. Read more about it here: https://www.nimblestorage.com/...

(almost) every Nimble array in the world reports back to InfoSight with data and statistics about the VM’s and connected hosts, which InfoSight automatically analyses and presenting it in a neat way for the user. A very good service and a matter affect, recently (the last couple of weeks) it have worked flawlessly, and hopefully this will continue.

One and a half years.

Other than InfoSight VMVision, no.

No issues.

Magnificent. Quick response and assistance when adding a support case. Even if you create a case at 11:00 PM, or during the weekend, you will get a response shortly after posting the case.

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.

Very straightforward, no difficulties at all.

Unlike HPE 3PAR, there is no licensing jungle to find your way out of.

No. We got a PoC array delivered to us first, that got us convinced about the product.

If you're currently looking for a new storage solution in your environment, give Nimble Storage a chance. I can promise you, you won't be disappointed.

• The product is easy and quick to implement
• Licensing is easy to understand and doesn’t require a license for each feature that they offer
• SSD for cache
• Great technical support
• Monitoring of components and quick replacements if they fail
• Can update firmware and OS without taking SAN offline

The organization is now able to take advantage of the benefits offered by virtualization such as vMotion. The storage is now able to support the required IOPs for all of our applications.

I haven't come across any so far.

I've used it for 10 months.

No issues encountered.

The product has been extremely stable so far.

We have not yet had the need to scale.

10/10.

10/10.

Prior to this, we were using storage on our servers.

It was very straightforward. The initial setup can be completed in less than hour as long as all of the network configurations have been completed.

It was in-house.

Price is comparable to other vendors’ products in the same class. The licensing is extremely easy to understand compared to some of the other vendors. Nimble doesn’t require separate licenses for each feature that they offer.

• EMC
• EqualLogic
• NetApp

Nimble offers solid products, are very easy to implement, and offer great performance.

We primarily use Nimble Storage for our production system.

We have a three-tier infrastructure.

The most useful features are high availability and the storage snapshot backup functionality.

The cost of this storage solution should be lower.

In the future, I would like to see a lower-end model that has Peer Persistence functionality.

We have been using HPE Nimble Storage for approximately three years.

Nimble is a stable storage solution.

This is a highly scalable product.

The technical support is very good. I can get expert support from an HPE engineer or instead, receive support online.

The initial setup is easy.

The pricing is expensive, although we do not pay anything in addition to the standard licensing fees.

My advice to anybody who is interested in HPE Nimble Storage is that I recommend it for high availability applications. I also suggest that they purchase spare parts for it.

Overall, this product is okay, and my only real complaint is about the cost.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have two use cases for the solution. One use case is for our daily work. Another use case is our shared platform. We are a service provider and we have our shared platform to sell some power, some compute and storage to our customers.

The improvement of our organization with Nimble Storage really is with the InfoSight cloud. We are much more proactive. We are never surprised by problems, some disks or control breaks or something like that. The whole staff is very proactive, and we have no problems. We have very high availability of the systems, and that's the main improvement; the end-to-end management from the server, hypervisor, all the storage.

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.

The only area of the product that could be improved is if you have to buy additional storage, you have to buy a block. You can't buy two or four hard drives as you can buy for every other system. You have to buy a block of 24 disks, and that's normally very expensive. So if a customer calls and they want to expand the system for a few terabytes, you have to sell them an expensive solution, and it's the same for us. But that's just part of the system. That's part of the architecture.

A feature that would be a nice addition to the next release would be a filer option. A filer option so that you could connect the sim or NFS or chips like NetApp does for NAS functionality.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. We are very happy with the product.

I have been using Nimble solutions for about four years, since it became part of HPE.

The solution is really very, very stable. We have never had any issues.

The solution is scalable in every direction. You can change the controller online, you can add additional drives, you can add additional connectivity; it's really scalable.

For the Nimble part, support is very available because it's InfoSight. You don't need any first and second-level engineers because of this InfoSight part. And if you really have a problem, but we never have, then you will be able to contact the third level or the engineering. That's really a big improvement, this cloud solution.

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.

The initial setup was very easy, but we are used to installing storage systems. We have been a storage seller for many years, around 25 years. So it's getting easier and easier.

The deployment takes about one hour. It takes more time to build it in the racks and link the cabling, but the rest is very easy.

I do all the deployment and consultant work myself.

Once you purchase the solution, you don't have to buy a license for Nimble. All of the features are included. You never need to buy a license.

Before choosing Nimble Storage, we also evaluated NetApp and Dell EMC. The biggest difference was the management stuff with InfoSight.

Ninety percent of the Nimble Storage we have sold because of InfoSight. I would advise potential users to check their management ecosystem and not the storage. The differentiator, and for me the most important part, is the management of the system. Because every system is fast and has high availability. That's normal at the moment. 

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that most of the storage problems are not storage-related. Because of the InfoSight cloud, you can see the whole ecosystem end to end. It's not always because a system is slow that's part of the storage; it could also be a server problem, it could also be a network problem, it could be something else. With InfoSight, this end-to-end view, we saw that most of these storage problems were not really storage problems.

We use HPE Nimble Storage for general purposes, not for high performance, just for archiving and backup solutions.

It is easy to use. Not too complicated.

The scalability could be better.

I have been working with HPE Nimble Storage for three years.

We have no issues with the stability of this solution, it's stable enough.

HPE Nimble Storage does not scale well. It needs improvement.

We have 50 users in our organization who are using it.

Technical support is good. I would rate the support a nine out of ten.

The installation is straightforward.

We had the help of HP and other consultants, it took two days to install and deploy this solution.

We pay a one-time fee for terabyte licenses, and the support is paid yearly.

There are costs in addition to the licensing fee, but it's included in the hardware.

My recommendation of this solution would depend on who is interested in using it, and what the purpose of using it would be.

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

The performance and reliability are excellent. Due to the fact that we are a provider, we need systems which just run and run and run the whole day and the whole night without issue. This product does just that. We are selling services, and therefore we need a system which works 24/7.

The initial setup is very easy.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is straightforward.

There is a new version of the Nimble and 3PAR systems called Alletra and they have a lot of new features. We have to check and have to give them a read, however, at the moment, there are some new features with cloud connections. It's a feature that they haven't finished yet. There's the possibility to move the workload to the cloud and back. At the moment, they don't really need any improvements.

I've been using the solution for around 20 years. It's been two decades. I've used it for a long while at this point. 

The stability is great. It just keeps running without issue. There are no bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze. It is quite reliable. 

The scalability is great. It scales in every direction.

While the technical support isn't good every single time, for the most part, we are happy with it. 

They could improve their services a bit. If you have some easy problems, for example, if a hard drive fails or something like that, that's not a problem for them to deal with. However, if you have strange problems related to performance issues or something like that, sometimes it's difficult to find the right person. In most cases, we are happy with the support.

The initial setup is very easy. It's not very complex or hard to do. If a company needs to set it up, it can do so with very little difficulty.

We are certified partners. We know exactly how to set up the solution and can do so for our clients if they need assistance. 

We are an HPE partner. We also use it as customers and end-users. 

Right now, we use the HPE 3PAR 8000 systems, we use Nimble systems, and we also sell some systems like Primera.

I'd recommend the solution to other companies.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're mostly quite happy with the product.

The companies that bought this solution from us use it for VMware. They have also used some Oracle in the Red Hat operating system. It's mostly used for the VMware environment. The companies we provide the solution to are generally medium size; one of them is a hospital and the other is an agency that controls the sale of gas. We are partners of HPE Nimble Storage and I'm the technical manager of the company.

A valuable feature for me is the architecture which is pretty good. We have a good throughput and we like that they have a lot of IOPS and low latency is also pretty good. And we also like the verification features because we get some good things with the method Nimble takes to duplicate. If you have a hybrid secondary storage, it allows you to do remote copy, data recovery and business continuity with the solution. And the integration with some other solutions is also good. For now, Nimble has a way of integrating with each solution, it's very good. 

When I'm competing against someone, I would like Nimble to be an active-active controller. As it is now, Nimble is an active-passive controller. If the customer is looking for an active-active controller, then we can't use Nimble and have to go with Primera. Nimble gives us a lot of good things, but without the active-active controller, it's pointless.

We've been using this solution for a year. 

The technical support is pretty good. We do the iteration ourselves, because we have the experience and we provide first-hand support, given the service qualifications that HPE expects from us. Beyond that, Nimble has good support, because it also has Infosight, another value-added solution for Nimble. Infosight has around 10 years of log collection. We provide good first line support to our customers and I think it's important for them to have that.

Nimble competes against IBM Storwize and Dell. The main reason we went with Nimble was that we have over 10 years of experience with Infosight.

We'll use this solution more in the future. With what I see now with the segregated hyper-converged infrastructure, I think that Nimble is going to get a lot more clients because hyper-converged solutions are a closed box and customers want this kind of solution. Customers felt that with the hyper-converged solutions, their hands were tied.

I would recommend this solution. It's been around for over 10 years, working with machine learning in artificial intelligence. It has inline deduplication for all flash storage, and a hybrid version that gives a lot of features. It's an architecture that's based on the controller.

The only drawback of this solution is the active-passive controller, otherwise I rate it very highly.

I rate this solution a nine out of 10.

We are resellers and HPE Nimble Storage is one of the products that we provide to our customers. We are not end-users of the solution.

The most valuable features are the HPE Performance Cluster Manager (HPCM) and InfoSight.

InfoSight is helpful because it is proactive support.

The stability can be improved.

I have been working with HPE Nimble Storage for approximately two years.

This product scales well.

The vendor has a lot of support available.

We also work with HPE Primera.

The initial setup is not complex at all. You can set it up in just a few minutes.

The pricing for this product is somewhat high.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.