HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

We have type of a private cloud-hosted solution in our data center. Nimble allows incredibly, fast data access for our SAN to our hypervisors and cluster. Nimble is just so good at what they do as far as the adaptive and hybrid flash stuff. We have two arrays: We have an adaptive and hybrid. 

We have a lot of healthcare clients. We have some who are in surgery at five in the morning. We are running these pretty heavy, intensive databases and SQL servers on the Nimble (or which are pulling off the Nimble). Having that type of server pinned to a specific volume, then having that volume accessible and prioritized over the other data which is on there, that is super helpful. This is why we like Nimble and what they do.

We want rock solid stability, making sure all of our customers have complete 100 percent uptime, which is our goal. Nimble achieves that pretty well.

InfoSight is a regular part of our weekly routine. We don't use it every single day, but we do check in on things every once in a while. Luckily, with Nimble, you can forget it and you don't really have to worry about it. However, if we do need to look into an issue, we definitely use InfoSight.

InfoSight has increased the availability of analytics and our ability to quickly get to them. We can migrate things faster. We can pull stuff out of production. We can restore from backups more quickly with the Nimble system than anything else.

We have had a couple of networking issues, temperature alarms, and a few things in our data center going on where InfoSight will scale back our utilization (or whatever) in order to keep us productive and up.

InfoSight has enabled us to get our servers back up faster, especially on the back-end. We have instant recovery. We are able to access that fast storage within seconds, which is very helpful. It enabled us to get service back up in a minute and a half.

The solution has improved our throughput tremendously. It has been on-demand access with 10 gig fiber. The disks, even though some of them are spinning discs, are rated, or in Nimble's little custom config in the way that it hits the cache first, then throws it off to the cold later. This is perfect, and it is great. It has improved everything.

The way that it optimizes the hot data versus cold data is really what Nimble does super well. 

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. It might help to have a software revision for something like this, or even a more intuitive local dashboard, not InfoSight, but Nimble's local dash. That would be great.

The UI and local dash need improvement. They have changed it around a little bit between firmware upgrades. When you do that, things are out of place and not where they used to be. There is also some granular nitty-gritty analytics that we would like to get down into deeper, like when you view volumes, you have percent-free space, and the ability to sort those volumes by the percentage or sort by the amount of data: the megabytes, gigabytes, etc. That is no longer available in the new UI. I would love to see that improved, where you can sort down the list. 

While InfoSight is very useful, if you widen your scope of range when you're trying to look at a month of reports, the averaging that it does sort of skews things a bit. If you drill down further into a day or hour, it looks a lot better. I wish they would have a chart or GUI that didn't average as heavily, just giving you minute spikes and things that you could see on a wider view.

The stability is awesome. The product has always been reliable. It has been 100 percent up. We have never had any downtime with it. Even if a controller fails due to our firmware or whatever, it rolls over to the second one and keeps us running.

Outside of the outages which are beyond Nimble, such as power issues in the data center or heat. Nothing has been an issue with the Nimble product.

The scalability is awesome. We have the potential for multiple petabytes moving forward. While we don't take advantage of that right now, as we only have maybe 400 to 500 terabytes, the scalability (and the ability to add a shelf dynamically by just throwing it in there and adding it to the pool) is simple and easy. We already did this with our CS300, and it turned out real well.

Nimble's support is awesome and one of the best. You sort of get a Tier 3 plus guy every time that you call, no matter if it is a Tier 0 issue. This is super helpful in case we ever have problems.

The technical support never has anything that they can't solve for us. I have thrown everything at them that I could, and they are always on top of it.

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.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I set up one last week, and you plug in your basic information for the array: The name and IPs, then you add it to your group, defining where you want it to point to. It's simple. It took me about 10 minutes to get everything up and rolling with the new HF.

We used a reseller, Flair Data Systems, out of Colorado Springs for our deployment. Flair has been awesome. They are partners for a lot of other things, as well as Nimble products.

We have seen tremendous ROI. It pays for itself 10 times over in the matter of four years.

The solution has increased our performance. We have about 20 times the IOPS that we use to, which was a huge selling point for us. We don't even use close to the amount that it is capable of handling, but it is certainly 20 times faster than what we had before.

We looked at Dell EMC, Nimbus, and Nimble.

Nimble just stuck out of the pack. The demo that they gave us years ago was really what sold it. We have a reseller who we work with, and we are a partner with them for other things. We do networks for them, and they do other system switching for us. The reseller had a Nimble and demonstrate it to us, which made the deal right there. It wasn't Nimble who did the demo, it was the reseller, and the reseller really came through.

Try it out. Demo it. Just have somebody put it in front of you, so you can poke around and demonstrate how it works with a real environment. Check out a Hyper-V or VMware. VMware is a lot more integrated with Nimble than Hyper-V. Live migrate your stuff. Move your stuff. Send backups to it. Send it over across the wire to a DR. Everything just works, and that is what we want.

It has been rock solid, 100 percent on time, and we have never had any issues with it.

We receive about a 2.4x compression rate, even on our old HPE CS300. With the new HF-Series, we will probably achieve a lot more than that because they have a lot of deduplication, etc. Unfortunately, we just deployed that last week. So, we are still in the trial process with it.

All-flash is coming down the pipeline. We don't have all-flash yet. We have all hybrid arrays. We are moving in that direction probably within the next two years or so.

We don't utilize any public cloud or HPE cloud stuff yet.

Biggest lesson learnt: Always go with a great vendor that has a great product.

For Nimble, valuable for us is the hybrid solution that they have on flash and spindle disk. So we are able to put very flexible loads on our private clouds in Nimble.

Well it was simple for us to implement this technology. At some point, for the duration of the storage, we were using EMC basically. And also, the analytics piece that Nimbo has is very convenient because you have a lot of information in real time on how the CPU is behaving, on storage and different stuff.

Actually they already have a solution for all flash. So, we are planning to use that in our deployment. So, actually there were no issues with features, and we are waiting for the upgrade.

We have been running with this solution for two years.

We haven't had any issues so far with the stability. It is really stable.

Scalability is a little bit limited. I mean, they have different models and you need to make some upgrades in CPUs or storage. It gets easier at some point but we reach some limits and we need to make an upgrade right away.

The support is very good.

The setup was very straightforward.

Whenever we want some more capacity, CPU, memory, storage etc, then we normally make an analysis and basically we make the upgrades.

We have Nimble and Tripper, as part of the approved solutions. We have Tintri and Dell Compellent.

We have been working with HP on the server side for a long time and I think that now that they have Nimble and Tripper, they have very good and complete solutions. So we trust them. And they have good solutions because depending on the type of load that you are trying to put together, I mean, you can choose either one of these systems.

There were multiple things which helped our choice, but in this particular case, it was EMC because the EMC solution was not using the same technology so we were not seeing the benefits of having this on the analytics especially.

Well its price is very important but also the support. It has a global presence. We are in 35 countries. So, whenever we choose a solution or a standard, we need to define that very clearly. Response time and the technology itself.

I mean go for it. It's a good solution. It's a right mix between costs and return on investment. Definitely upgrade.

Performance, snapshot and replication capability. It’s also nice that they continue to add features at no cost through software updates. Their online portal InfoSight is helpful for tracking assets, health, utilization and other metrics.

Performance – our arrays can handle varying workloads effectively. Snapshot and replication capability – have allowed us to simplify and improve our backup and recovery capabilities. Their online portal InfoSight is helpful for tracking assets, health, utilization and other metrics. It’s also nice that they continue to add features at no cost through software updates.

We shifted from tape based backups to snapshot and replication based backups. That improved backup performance, restore time, reliability and reduced manual effort on managing the backups.

It would be good to have a built in way to index snapshots so that we’d be able to granularly see what files were in a snapshot and restore at a file level. We’re using an add on product from Commvault to achieve this.

4 years.

No.

No. The solutions are very scalable. There are multiple ways to upgrade and scale – adding storage shelves, upgrading flash, upgrading processing etc.

Excellent. Proactive alerting. Responsive phone support unlike many other companies. Our local field rep is always willing to help.

Many different SANs.

Quick to set up and configure.

Reasonable pricing compared to other SAN vendors.

EMC, IBM, NetApp.

Give it a try with a POC. This is one of the rare vendors that do what they say they will. Their sales team is very easy to work with.

We have a primary data center, and then a secondary data center for our applications and our colo (colocation data center). Our financial and document management systems are on this platform.

This solution has given us reliability that is evident by the fact that it has been running for five years with virtually no hiccups.

InfoSight automatically predicted or resolved problems in your environment. It has given us insights with respect to our VM using more resources than we thought.

Our performance has increased by approximately ten to fifteen percent.

The most valuable features of this solution are the replication functionality and the snapshotting of the storage array.

InfoSight has been very useful because it gives me the ability to see what ones are actually working and how they’re functioning.

We use this for business-critical applications. Our financial and documentation management systems are on this platform.

An area that needs improvement is extending the life of the device after five years.

The solution is very good with respect to stability. The uptime is very good.

The scalability of this solution is moderate. 

Storage capacity efficiency is very fitting for our company and our usage.

Technical support for this solution is good.

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.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We deployed this solution ourselves.

We have seen ROI, but I do not have specific data points.

Our options were IBM and HP, and we found that HP was the better choice for us.

Using this solution has shown us some of the things that are possible, and what we can better improve on in the future.

Nimble Storage is a solution that I would recommend to anybody who is in the same kind of space as I am.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is production storage. We run ERP applications, as an example, of our business-critical applications.

There has been no downtime, which is probably the best thing.

We use InfoSight predictive analytics. It helps us from a performance perspective by identifying potential bottlenecks.

InfoSight has identified controller failures or performance issues.

Performance and support are its most valuable features.

The uptime has been solid.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is good. We bought it in such a way that we could add disk to it, so we provided foresight into our purchase anyway.

The solution’s storage capacity efficiency is good. The new solution is doing deduplication now, as well as compression. The old solutions could only do compression, so it has been good that way.

All-flash positions our organization for growth. Our last solution did not.

The technical support is excellent. My team is extremely happy with Nimble Support and InfoSight.

We had performance issue on our previous solution (AF3000).

The initial setup was straightforward because we have a rep who we have dealt with for six to seven years.

We used a reseller, CDW, for the deployment. Our experience with CDW was good, but it was our Nimble HPE rep who really did the work.

The solution has doubled our performance, which is why we upgraded.

The solution has improved our throughput, keeping applications responsive.

It is a CAPEX investment. Over the anticipated lifespan, I would say the pricing is $10,000 a month.

The price has room for improvement.

Pure Storage and Nimble were on our shortlist. 

We chose Nimble because they were the incumbent. We had a good experience with them. They have good support. Ultimately, they had the better price.

We receive great support. We have had no unplanned downtime.

Our experience with the product has been excellent.

We use Nimble to virtualize all of our applications. For the hypervisor we use VMware. We use Nimble for the storage platform for the hypervisor.

It's been performing amazingly. 

Our organization functions very similarly to how it had operated prior to Nimble, but our applications are more responsive. The time it takes to produce some reports - specifically our year-end accounting reports which, sometimes, could take a half a day to produce - now, with Nimble on the backside, with the high I/O that it has, we're finding that we're reducing the time to process these reports by up to 70 to 80 percent. It's a significant improvement.

InfoSight provides real-time reporting, it gives you information about your different volumes, how the arrays are being used, I/O, performance in general. That's where we find value in it as well.

What I have seen so far has been sufficient for our needs.

Scalability is another reason we chose to go with Nimble: upgrading to another storage array. If we need higher capacity or throughput, we can just replace controllers, we don't have to replace or forklift-upgrade the whole chassis.

I've used their technical support once. They contacted me, proactively. It was a positive experience. We were there doing some regular maintenance and accidentally pulled a 10-gig module and, while we were swapping it, and thought we had done it right, the array went offline for about 20 or 30 seconds. They let us know that there was something wrong pretty quickly. That was pretty awesome.

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.

We absolutely already see a return on investment. There's definitely value in it. Not only from the increase in productivity for the users using the applications that Nimble is hosting, but from an IT standpoint, expanding the volumes, regular maintenance, adding, it's just very simple to use.

We have only had it a short period of time, so it's hard to tell if it has affected our IT operation expenses yet. Maybe it has a little bit.

We did consider other vendors. Ultimately, I had had my eye on Nimble for a long time, and I had already researched it, had done my homework on it, and was just waiting for the right opportunity.

From a virtualized infrastructure standpoint, I would advise that, if you are looking for a high-performing storage array - not necessarily long-term storage because the price per gig is pretty expensive on an all-flash array. But, application performance, database performance, if you're running Exchange environments, SQL environments, If you're doing that type of stuff, then Nimble is a good match for that type of workload.

I would definitely and easily rate Nimble a 10 out of 10.

It is storage for our VMware vSphere servers. It is also a destination for some Commvault backups and replications. We use it for a number of things.

It has been three years, and the performance has been great. We have bought eight more since buying the first one.

In our organization, when people say "I need a new server," I say, "I have the space."

• Zero downtime
• Very easy installation
• Easy upgrades

My version does not have dedupe, it has compression. I know that they have dedupe now. I just need to buy it. 

I would like to see native network attached storage (NAS) functionality. Our customers are looking for NAS, and Nimble can't give it to them.

I have added expansion shelves on several of them. It is simple to do. You plug it in, you attach two cables, then you press one button, like "Add", and that is all you have to do, which is wonderful.

Technical support is very good. When I call, I get a top-tier guy right away. I do not call very often, but if I have a question, such as, how to tear apart this array and add it to this one over here, they tell me right away. It is great.

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.

The setup was approximately an hour-long process, almost like a one-button process. It was just so easy. Compared to most things that I have ever installed, it was simple and amazingly easy.

The first two that I bought were incredibly expensive, compared to the last five to seven that I have bought. The price has come way down, and it has been a year or so since we bought one.

We thought about the HPE 3PAR, but it seemed to be pricey. Frankly, Nimble came in and sold us on their solution. The 3PAR guy did not really make a strong sales presentation. He just said, "Trust me, it's good." My reaction was, we can't just trust you. Whereas, the Nimble guy told us the ins and outs of it and gave us all the details.

Try it out. You will love InfoSight, their online viewing tool, it is a wonderful addition. HPE thought so too, so they bought it and are putting it in everywhere. It is great, no downtime, with no care and feeding from my point of view. It just works.

It has surpassed all of our needs, it has been great. I need to buy more now, I am almost out of capacity. I would give it an unqualified 10 out of 10.

They could probably improve an organization with just about anything. It is all a matter of ease of use, ease of the implementation, etc. From that perspective, I would like to think it has been able to accomplish what people want done in an easier way, so they can get other stuff done.

• The all-flash arrays, today people really want them. 
• Their hybrid stuff is great. 
• They do a good job of helping people do storage in a very simple way.

There are customers who want to do some different things with the Microsoft Resilient File System. There are some customers who want to do different types of connectivity. I do not know if I would call that an improvement, necessarily, because if you want that, you should get a different product.

We have not had any issues whatsoever from our customer base. 

I have heard of one customer who had a catastrophic failure. I do not know if it was caused by the product or something they did. From our perspective, the product is very stable.

It fits everywhere. It just depends on what the customer is trying to accomplish. If you are somebody who needs 30 petabytes of storage at rest, it is probably not the right thing to do. If you are somebody who is trying to grow a virtualization implementation of some sort, and you just need storage which keeps growing, that is where it should go. We have used this product in all of those environments, and we have also used different products at the really big end.

They did something very well that most people fail at, they created raving fans! The way they did that was by creating a good product, but more importantly, they created a tech support who supports more than just their product. If you called in and you had VMware trouble, most people would say, "That is a VMware problem," but they would get a guy on the phone who knew what was going on with VMware and help you. 

That was the number one thing which made us approve of it. After that, it was just their innovation; their continuing to just keep up with everything. 

Since they were acquired by HPE, I cannot speak too much about the technical support. They did have everything down better than anybody else. That was what drew us to them.

If you are a super small company, the product is probably not right for you. It is out of your price range. Anything from mid-SMB up to enterprise, it is absolutely the right product.

I am giving it a 10 out of 10 because I can't think of a reason why I would not. The product is good and always has been.