HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• Support
• Pricing
• Technical engineers
• Units are nice because its only one box, while, for example, ExtremIO was six units
• Setup was very easy because the software was user-friendly

• We now have a smaller footprint.
• I'm surprised at how fast the hybrid is.
• The whole technical staff expertise is very strong.
• It's resilient - you're only supposed to pull out two drives at a time, but we pulled four simultaneously and it still survived.

Currently there's no deduplication, and I would like to see that. Also, it's still slower than flash storage.

The VDI is supposed to be smooth, but we still saw a little delay in typing and performing general work even though we didn’t put much load into it.

The controls are built into the unit, and I wouldn’t hesitate to scale it.

The tech support is great. Within a few minutes of pulling drives, someone calls or emails right away to check up.

It was very simple and fast. It only took three hours, including racking, to set everything up.

All the features are included in Nimble, so there's no need to pay for features later on.

We were looking for a VDI solution that gave the same performance as a desktop/laptop. We tested PureStorage and ExtremIO, but chose to do a PoC with Nimble because others who were already using it were so positive about it.

If you're not using it for VDI, it's also good for general storage.

In our company, it is the back-end storage for virtual machines and file storage.

On our website, there are many different business-critical things running.

We migrated from a hybrid cloud to an all-flash. 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.

Infosight is good. We watch the capacity side of it. That is about all we have seen on there. InfoSight does allow us to get servers back up faster. We run a lot of virtual servers, so it is about ten times faster from deploying until it is up.

I want to see the full integration with OneView. I know they have started it, but I haven't had a chance to look at and evaluate it.

Uptime has been a 100 percent in our environment.

The product is very stable. There was some concern about HPE buying Nimble, but I think that it has gone okay, so far.

It is very scalable.

The deduplication of all-flash enables you to grow without having to actually grow the storage. That piece of the all-flash enables you to really grow, not having to keep growing in the racks.

The technical support is very good.

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.

The initial setup was very easy. I don't even know if we had to look at documentation, except in the very beginning, where we have to consult in. The solution provided what we needed to set it up.

We did it ourselves.

The solution has improved our throughput, because when we move large data it is just that much faster.

Every user is ten times faster at doing whatever work they're doing.

Performance per dollar, when we looked at it, was the highest that we could get for what we needed.

We evaluated other competitors (Pure Storage and NetApp), and it came down to cost per a dollar of what you could get.

Pure Storage had better deduplication rates, but it just cost three times more.

The product comes down to budget, I/O, and the use case that you need. 

It is really efficient in the size that it is.

Biggest lesson learnt: All-flash matters.

It has vastly improved the responsiveness of our servers. It adds snapshots to help with our DR. The snapshots are sent across the way into our DR site, so we have DR copies of everything. It’s all around just improved the flow of everything.

Its speed, ease of use, and it has been completely reliable.

They keep talking about doing one-to-many replication. This is what we'd like to see, just to help with data replication.

I think it’s very stable. We've never, ever, had it go offline and we've been using it for three years now.

We've scaled up and have had no issues with that. It’s easy, and it doesn't even take it offline when you do it. It’s pretty awesome.

I have used technical support a couple times and they are very good. They keep going until they find a solution, if you're having a problem.

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.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was probably a little complex if you never set up any kind of storage system like that. Other than that, it wasn't too bad.

We had the guy come in just because we had never done it before and their sales engineer really made it go a lot easier.

I'd definitely tell them to go with Nimble. I would suggest that they have the Nimble engineer come on site. They don't charge you for that part. This is just so you can get all the thing set up correctly the first time so you are ready to go when you put it into production.

When looking for a vendor, I look for reliability, the features that we need, and the cost.

• Simplified storage administration: Due to this, a dedicated storage administrator is no longer needed. Now, we can easily handle the storage systems ourselves.
• Very efficient adaptive flash technology: Even without having hundreds of rotating disks like we had in our former SAN system or having to buy all-flash storage, we get predictable and low latency numbers for all of our storage systems.
• Simple snapshot management: This assists us to manage our snapshots through volume collections and protection plans, and helps ensure that new volumes get the appropriate replication and snapshot plan applied. The overview of snapshot used storage and ease of use when cloning are remarkable compared to legacy storage products.
• Central monitoring and health check via the Nimble InfoSight: The InfoSight portal provides an overview of all our storage systems and their volumes, snapshots and protection. It collects data and creates both automatically generated tickets for any problems or risk of problems, as well as predictions of storage use based on usage trends.

For the most part, we have not encountered any stability issues. But there was one uptime-related firmware bug, which was possible to work around and fixed in a later release.

So far, we have not encountered any scalability issues.

We rate the support as very knowledgeable in the product platform

We previously used a different product. The switch was made to gain a less-complex design for setup and administration.

The initial setup was very simple and after one day of education, all technical staff were comfortable with the platform.

One benefit with the Nimble Storage platform is that is doesn’t contain any software licenses. All functionality comes built-in to the platform.

We compared both traditional vendors including NetApp and HPE as well as upcomers like Pure Storage, Violin, SolidFire, Microsoft Storage Server and others.

Embrace simplicity. You can dispense with in-house deployed administration tools or tricky CLI GUIs. All you need is just a simple and understandable web interface.

Depending on which product platform you are about to replace, you will either just gain far better and predictable performance or you will embark on a journey where you will have to leave the comfort of having a multi-protocol NAS into NFS and/or SMB file servers using Nimble block storage in the backend.

• Nimble InfoSight: Provides deep information about not only the Nimble array, but also some insight into the data that resides on it.
• Seamless OS upgrade

This provides for better decision making and forecasting of the evolution of customer data management infrastructures.

Additionally, the stability of the Nimble OS provides peace of mind even during OS upgrades, which are seamless and non-disruptive.

As a reseller, this product is an easy sell for customers who are price conscious.

This product could improve by adding support for file protocols such as CIFS or NFS, the ability to seamlessly migrate from one volume to another, and the capability to perform in-line deduplication.

Volume encryption must be done prior to occupying data on the volume. A data migration is required if the encryption requirement changes. This could be improved by being able to turn on encryption on previously created volumes without the need for data migration.

Our first customer that we implemented this solution for was 5 months ago.

We have not encountered any stability issues thus far.

There have been no scalability issues. We added an ES1 expansion shelf with no issues.

Technical support is very eager to close tickets. They should verify that the issue has been resolved before closing.

We are a provider of solutions. We will place technologies where they fit.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. Some understanding of Nimble’s network architecture is required.

This is a great solution if pricing and licensing is a concern.

We evaluated NetApp FAS, EMC Unity, and Pure Storage.

Consider other options if file protocols are required. Enable encryption at the time of setup if required, prior to creating volumes.

• Nimble InfoSight is an extremely powerful and useful tool. We log in daily to look at any new alerts, mostly ones that have been cleared without us needing to do anything, as well as using it as a capacity management tool and executive dashboards to present information to our senior management team.
• Other than InfoSight, Nimble snapshotting and replications, as well as the zero-byte cloning, are invaluable to us as a company and has greatly improved our offerings to clients over our previous storage vendor.
• We also like the new VMVision. This grabs stats from our entire VMware environment and allows us to troubleshoot all levels of our environment in one view. This helps to diagnose where the issues lie, either storage, network or the hosts themselves. This has been absolutely invaluable when we have separate teams managing each part.

We supply hourly (or more frequent) snapshots on our private hosted clients. Under the previous vendor’s arrays, there was large management overhead to keep these working.

Since switching to Nimble arrays, we have not only been able to keep triple the amount of snapshots as standard, using, on average, around 70% less space than keeping 8 on the previous arrays, but the management overhead to keep these going has dropped down to about five minutes a month. Now, using InfoSight, we can see at a glance what we have.

There is not a lot of room for improvement. All the items that we wanted to have implemented when we first started using Nimble arrays were either already on their road map, or added after listening to us, and all bar one have now been fully implemented.

These included:

• Active Directory authentication for logging into the management of the array.
• Full audit logging of all actions taken on the array.
• Full VMware implementation for managing the arrays. This has and will continue to save us a lot of time.

We have now been using Nimble Storage arrays for almost four years. We started with two arrays and now have 16, and support a further eight at client sites.

We have never had any stability issues. The Nimble arrays have survived an awful lot within our environment. We now have 16 arrays and other than a single hard drive failure and a precautionary controller swap (predictive analysis from InfoSight flagged a potential issue, so Nimble replaced the controller rather than risk downtime), the Nimble arrays have been our most reliable hardware.

We have never encountered scalability issues. Using InfoSight to help plan capacity, we know way in advance what we will need to increase performance or capacity. When we need to either increase capacity or performance, all upgrades are performed so simply and with zero down time.

The technical support from Nimble is second to none. Whenever we have called them, we get straight through to a technician, who does not follow a script designed to frustrate you and waste all your time. They listen to your problem, and what, if anything, you have already tried. Then they help and most of the time, any issues are resolved there and then on a single call. Sometimes we have called them simply because we do not understand something, or even a new feature that we wanted to use, and they are happy to dedicate time to us to explain and show us how to do what we want. We have never had an ongoing ticket with Nimble other than when they are awaiting a response or action from us, that we can only perform during weekends.

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.

When we first started speaking to Nimble, they sent us two trial devices so we could truly perform a PoC that matched our planned deployment. They also sent a senior engineer along for a day to assist us in setting it up. The engineer ended up not really being needed as the array setup is very simple. There are two methods, both shown to us by the engineers.

Since the initial setup, all arrays have been configured by my in-house technicians and usually an array is fully configured, and up and running within half an hour (this doesn’t include time to get it in our racks and patched). After accidentally shipping our arrays to the wrong sites, we were able to easily and remotely talk others through the reconfiguration.

The pricing for the arrays is very transparent. There is one cost for the array, and another for support. There are zero licensing costs. Whatever you pay for the array, you get all features included with full access to their InfoSight, knowledge base and downloads. It’s a very simple model, which our finance team love.

When we went to market, the team already had a good knowledge of other vendors, having used a good variety of arrays between us. Nimble were the first new array we got in to test. They blew us away with their performance and their support. The personal touch they gave us really helped, too. They took the time to learn about our needs and our environment. It was easy to decide not to go to anyone else.

If you’re looking to implement, ask for a trial; Nimble have been very accommodating with us and others. Their products speak for themselves and will show that the figures they post are actually lower than the performance you can get out their arrays. Speak to any Nimble client. There are lot that are happy to take reference calls. This alone speaks volumes for them as a company.

1. CASL makes use of hybrid disks to retrieve frequently used data from a set of flash drives while storing actual data to high capacity SAS drives.
2. Zero Copy Clone saves storage space by updating only changed blocks to the cloned copy.
3. In-line Compression reduces the amount of space taken up by data without impacting performance.
4. Very Efficient Replication – Only replicates changed blocks which eliminates the need for expensive compression/dedup devices such as Riverbed.
5. Instantaneous snapshots provides a backup dataset of an entire server or the volume that can be restored or used to retrieve data or clone another server
6. Encryption – Ability to encrypt the entire SAN or selected volumes to protect data at rest which meets many government requirements and security requirements.
7. Easy setup, GUI interface and command line tools to administer the SAN.
8. InfoSight provides access to call history, historical performance, updates, performance metrics for virtual environment, KB articles, Nimble community, all for free – very valuable site.
9. Excellent Support Technicians – support techs are very knowledgeable and provides quick and efficient solution. They not only know Nimble SAN but are also very knowledgeable about virtual environments/technologies, switches, fiber, databases, applications and other networking devices that are involved in making a cloud technology.
10. Full redundancy makes all the parts hot swappable and expandable.
11. Grouping SANS and moving volumes between the SAN while the data is in active use on the servers – without any downtime.
12. No licensing for individual features – everything is included.

We have a small datacenter with Nimble Storage SANs that replicates to Nimble Storage SAN at our remote Disaster Recovery location. We are able to replicate every two hours and some of the tests we have done shows very good data integrity upon recovery at the DR location. Along with virtual servers and Nimble Storage, DR is much easier now.

Over a year ago, Nimble was available with either iSCSI connectivity or Fiber. Controllers can be upgraded or replaced with either of the connectivity interfaces. But, a combination of iSCSI and Fiber unit will provide flexibility in connecting SAN with existing network switches or fiber switches which can reduce overall cost and help with connecting high IO devices to the fiber interface.

Not at all. It’s been up and running ever since. We have had a few hard drive failures. Support actually calls us to let us know that there is a problem and a replacement part is on the way. It arrives in less than 4 hours. If we unplug a wire or perform maintenance on switches, Nimble support gets all the alerts and they proactively contacts us to see if there are any issues. We also receive a call from our Service Engineer to check on the health of the device and whenever there are any updates to the software.

We have expanded cache on one of the SAN which was very easy to do without any downtime.

9.9999 on a scale of 1-10 (1=worst, 10=best).

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.

Initial setup can be done using a Nimble setup client or via the console in about 5 easy steps.

If you are looking for a scalable, easy, performance, expandable SAN which provides all the great features without charging you licensing fees for all these useful features, go with Nimble Storage.

Yes, EMC, NetApp, Simplivity and Violin.

You will be up and running in an hour. Very easy steps to setup and five clicks to setup volumes, replication, etc.

1. Simplified storage administration

A dedicated storage administrator is no longer needed. All of our engineers have attended the one-day training and has the knowledge how to handle the Storage Systems. With our former SAN systems we had to have an external contractor doing part time administration for us due to the complexity. Now we can easily handle the Storage systems ourselves.

2. Very efficient adaptive flash technology

Even without having hundreds of rotating disks like we had in our former SAN system or having to buy an All-flash Storage, we get predictable and low latency numbers for all of our Storage Systems.

3. Simple snapshot management

Managing Snapshots through Volume collections and Protection Plans it’s easy to make sure new volumes get the appropriate replication and snapshot plan applied, which is easy to maintain and change for all volumes. The overview of used storage for snapshots and the ease of use when cloning a snapshot is remarkable compared to legacy Storage products.

4. Central monitoring and health check via the Nimble InfoSight

The InfoSight portal gives us an overall overview of all our Storage Systems and their volumes, snapshots and protection. InfoSight collects data and creates both automatically generated tickets for any problems or risk of problems as well as predictions of storage use based on usage trends. This helps us a lot avoiding anything from volume protection configuration mishaps to prediction on storage outage.

Increased administrative simplicity and predictable performance.

• Improved snapshot overview in array management GUI.
• Possibility to apply centralized policies across multiple systems.

Close to a year. In total we're running about ten systems.

One uptime related firmware bug, which was possible to work around and fixed in a later release.

No, not so far.

We rate the support as very knowledgeable in the product platform.

Yes, the switch was made to gain a less complex design with regards to setup and administration.

The initial setup was very simple and after one day of education all tech staff were comfortable with the platform.

One benefit with the Nimble Storage platform is that is doesn’t contain any software licenses. All functionality comes built-in to the platform.

We compared both traditional vendors as NetApp and HPE, as well as up-comers like Pure Storage, Violin, SolidFire, Microsoft Storage Server and others.

Embrace simplicity – no more in-house deployed admin tools or tricky CLI GUI’s, just a simple and understandable web interface.

Depending on which product platform you are about to replace – you will either just gain a far better and predictable performance or a journey where you will have to leave the comfort of having a multi-protocol NAS into NFS and OR SMB file servers using Nimble block storage in the backend.