HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• Easy-to-implement snapshot technology
• Replication included with no need for additional licensing

In addition to exceptional performance and reliability, it covers, "for free", all the needs our primary backup system cannot provide due to costly licensing.

The product is near perfect, but there is always room for further development; maybe, more automation in snapshot management.

I have used Nimble Storage for about three years.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

We had multiple storage solutions that simply got to their EOL.

Setup was relatively simple, even with the very first Bonjour installer.

Our last purchase took place three years ago. I cannot advise on today's market.

I joined the company after the decision has been made. An external IT provider assisted with making this decision.

Nimble was pretty unique at the time with their new CASL architecture. There are many more products built on the same principles today on the market. So, as usual, shop around before making this strategic decision.

Snapshotting and replication.

These features provide a good resilience for business continuity and disaster recovery, by enabling us to effectively store data away from our primary site and giving us the ability to restore data relatively quickly.

Ability to replicate data offsite for DR protection in an easy and automated fashion.

Easier retrieval of snapshotted data and more granular control is desired.

This is in comparison to something like Veeam or MS shadow copy, where restoration of files is easier in their respective proprietary GUIs.

Snapshotting with Nimble can be very granular, but the restoration from a snapshot is not as easy as restoring with other systems.

3 years.

No issues.

No issues.

9/10

Yes, switched for scalability and cost effectiveness of data storage/protection.

Get what you pay for, in-line pricing with other vendors.

Evaluate with Nimble, they are very helpful and able to answer queries about data storage requirements. No hard sell.

We are a solution provider and Nimble is one of the storage products that we implement for our clients.

The most valuable feature is data mirroring.

The documentation is good.

Scalability, in terms of being able to scale out, is not easy and should be improved.

In the future, I would like to see the vendor upgrade the hardware.

I have been working with Nimble Storage for seven years.

This product is definitely stable and we use it on a daily basis.

Scaling up is easy, but scaling out is not easy.

We have a team of five people who are responsible for maintenance. There are a very large number of end-users.

I have never been in contact with technical support because we have sanctions that prohibit it. When I need assistance then I seek help in the community.

I have worked with other similar solutions and I find that there are no big differences between them.

The initial setup is very easy.

Once the solution has been delivered, I can set it up myself.

The pricing is better than some of the competitors, such as Dell EMC.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Nimble Storage is to perform a step-by-step deployment, and write down the steps as you go. This will ultimately save a lot of time if you experience any problems.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's given us more time to do the important things, less time worrying about SANs and failures and picking up the pieces. It just works. 

• Reliability
• Monitoring
• Support is brilliant

This is a tricky one, really. It does everything we would want from a SAN. It doesn't make the drinks, but all we're looking for is performance and reliability, and it does that.

There hasn't been any downtime that wasn't self-inflicted. We ran out of at space once. We didn't ignore the warnings, but we didn't do anything about the warnings. But it's been perfectly reliable on its own.

We started with a single unit, four years ago we bought another unit; then a more powerful unit about 18 months later, because we had a merger; we bought another system about 18 months ago and then a disk shelf about two months ago. So yes, scalability has been fine.

They know the product inside out, but they are also really good at the ancillary bits, like VMware. You can ring them up with something that's potentially not even a Nimble problem, and you'll get somebody that is really, really good. Best support that we have on anything, really.

In the past we've always gone for secondary and tertiary units, so it's kind of been starting from scratch. This time, the disk shelf, we haven't done it yet, but it's supposed to be as simple as plugging it in and clicking on go. Hopefully, it will be.

It delivers High IOPS, but more important, low latency. This is the most important part for our usage.

• VMware integration, why is pretty self-explanatory.
• Nimble offers better VMware integration then EMC does.
• Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environment.
• Fibre Channel support

Nimble offers InfoSight, which in turn offers VMVision. This is a terrific feature. You can immediately see which VM causes the highest IOPS and which has the most latency. The downside of this feature is that you can only see it on InfoSight and the data is always a few hours old. It would be awesome if this was in the dashboard of the Nimble and shown as live data.

Also, Nimble requires its DNS to work in order to interface with VMware vCenter is a little thorn in my eye, but I am being nitpicky here.

No issues.

No issues.

• High IOPS and a relatively low price
• Low space and power requirements: We are seeing a 75% reduction in rack space usage by replacing the previous storage with Nimble. The power requirement is also down by about 75%, which is very important to lengthen the UPS usage time.
• Cheap snapshot and clone: We have hundreds of snapshots in Nimble with no perceived reduction in performance, used as backup.
• Replication: We are building a DRC and will use this feature heavily.
• Compression: We are seeing more than a 15% savings in storage space with compression.

With snapshot, we achieve better IT operation as we have a snapshot before any major IT admin work takes place. This is good fallback if anything goes wrong with upgrade, modification, etc.

We heard from the Nimble pre-sales in 2015 that an inline deduplication feature is forthcoming (2016). What I know now is that this is not the case, dedup is only for all-flash array only, something to do with computational constraint. Well, we are a little unhappy with this news but because almost all the competition (VMware VSAN etc.) is also doing the same thing (inline dedup only on all-flash) I guess it’s not yet feasable with current technology.

We have used this solution for one year.

We have not encountered any stability issues. It has been rock solid.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The level of technical support is good.

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.

The setup was straightforward.

Licensing is very simple and everything is included.

We evaluated other options. We received a competitive offer from NetApps, but they lost on size. They are still a traditional solution, relying on the number of spindles and performance.

Please test first, i.e., get a PoC. The product relies on cache, so streaming data, such as CDR and logs, may not be a good fit, IOPS-wise.

We use HPE Nimble Storage for virtual infrastructure by VMware and for Oracle databases.

The most valuable features are the duplication and compression traffic. We have second storage that we can use for the synchronization of data between the data centers.

The HPE Nimble Storage could have better integration with monitoring and machine learning system information solutions.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for approximately two years.

HPE Nimble Storage has been stable.

The scalability is good.

There is an excellent support team with HPE Nimble Storage.

HPE Nimble Storage has helped our customers. It has saved them money for the future.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage a ten out of ten.

We have a server that needs a faster distribution solution, and we use Nimble for its storage.

The replay and IOPS work well. It's user-friendly, and we're satisfied with it. 

The dashboard can be improved. I would like to see more details on the dashboard in the next release.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for about three years.

HPE Nimble Storage is stable. All the drives are functioning well so far, and you only have to do maintenance on a yearly basis.

The support response time is good.

The initial setup was straightforward. We were able to implement it quite quickly.

HPE Nimble Storage didn't require a license at the time.

I would recommend HPE Nimble Storage to potential users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE Nimble Storage a nine.