HPE Nimble Storage Reviews

• Support, it is superb!
• InfoSight, especially VM Vision.
• Easy of setup and management, no need for storage experts.
• Performance, just delivers on all that it promises.
• Maintenance price is fixed for 5 years.

We do not need to employ storage specialists to set up and manage our storage.

InfoSight gives us in-depth knowledge to ensure our storage and associated systems are performing well, which is more than we could even get from previous storage systems.

Support for near synchronous replication.

Currently the smallest snapshot window is 15 minutes, that means if we replicate data from one array to another array we will be up to 15 minutes out of date, this is the RPO.

We have a small number of systems that need to be replicated in such a way that we do not lose any data if we need to fail-over to the replica on the second SAN, or at least it should be only seconds behind.

Some SANs, like NetApp, have a synchronous replication feature, so when data is written to SAN1 a copy is sent to SAN2, only when this has been written successfully at SAN2 does the data on SAN1 get flagged as written. This means both SANs are in-step.

This is great if you have the SANs locally and have a fast connection, but if they are in different data centres and the WAN link is slow you get latency issues while the data is written and acknowledged by SAN2.

When I talk about near synchronous replication I am thinking of how DoubleTake from Vision Solutions works, I have been using this for over 15 years to do this type of replication.

This works by copying the block of data on SAN1 directly to the local volume, but taking a copy and putting it into a buffer. This means latency at SAN1 is not compromised.

The copied block is then sent across the WAN to the second SAN, where it is written and acknowledged back to the DoubleTake system on SAN1. Once the acknowledgement is back the local copy on SAN1 is deleted.

This means if any latency on the WAN does not impact the speed of storage on SAN1, although the data on SAN2 could be a little bit behind, but in most cases we are talking seconds at the mots, and once any congestion on then WAN link has gone the replication is nearly as fast as a pure synchronous system will achieve, so for most purposes it is as close to real-time as required.

If the WAN goes down, or you need to take SAN2 off-line for any reason, the only impact on SAN1 is the buffer grows with data to be replicated, and once the WAN or SAN2 is back on line this is flushed to SAN2 as fast as the WAN can transfer the data.

You need a ‘re-synch’ feature in case the volume on SAN2 is corrupted, this checks the CRC on the data blocks between the two systems and re-transmits any blocks that do not match.

• AFA 5000 - 5 months
• CS260 - 3 years
• CS210 - 4.5 years

No, none at all.

The CS210 is very limited and could not be expanded despite having spare slot’s for drives. But we were able to scale-out two of these to create a larger single unit.

But we have first generation hardware that cannot be upgraded unlike newer systems.

Amazing. Nothing is too much trouble, and they have a wealth of information they can access to help you.

• 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.

Biggest problem was fitting the arrays into the racks – need to bend the rails (shoe or hammer required). Fixed in the latest models.

Took less than 30 minutes to get up and running and connected to our servers.

Simple – one price for the equipment, one price for the support and maintenance (fixed for 5 years), any updates and improvements and all licences included.

Looked at options from Hitachi, EMC, NetApp and HP.

Make full use of their Pre-Sales engineers, make them your best friend, they will stay with you for the journey and can assist you get the best out of the equipment.

Don’t be frightened of asking Support for help, if you authorise full data collection they can look at a wealth of information on your behalf covering more than the actual storage elements.

Ratings:

• AFA 5000 - 10/10
• CS260 - 9/10 - Only because the AFA is better as it has in-line de-duplication.
• CS210 - 7/10 - Limited expansion without adding further trays.

I use HPE Nimble Storage for Hyper-V clusters. I'm using the latest OS and the latest firmware. I keep them updated.

It keeps my machines up and running. For deduplications, it's a pretty good machine.

Deduplication is probably the most valuable feature. It's very easy to set up. It's very stable, and it has got great deduplication, especially for hypervisor users.

There should be faster interfaces.

It would be nice if you could use something other than the proprietary rights on it.

I've been using HPE Nimble Storage for about a year and a half.

I'd rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability. I haven't had any issues.

I'd rate it a ten out of ten in terms of scalability.

I'd rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

It was easy, but I've been doing it for twenty years. I'm not worried about that. 

We have absolutely seen an ROI.

Its price is a little higher.

I'd rate HPE Nimble Storage a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for ERP.

The performance of the solution is excellent. It's the most valuable aspect of the product. The stability is great.

The scalability of the solution is great.

The deployment is fast.

Technical support is helpful. 

It would be ideal if all these enterprise-class high-performance products would come at a cheaper price.

The initial setup could be simplified a bit. 

I've been dealing with the solution for a few years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. The performance is great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Scalability is good with this product. If a company wants to expand it, it's not a problem.

We have two or three clients on the product right now. 

I've had no issues with technical support. They are helpful and responsive. 

The initial setup is always complex, however, it is manageable. Of course, it could always be a bit easier in the future. 

The initial deployment is pretty fast and takes less than a week.

A company would typically need one or two engineers for deployment and maintenance tasks. 

The solution is quite expensive. We'd like them to lower the cost of the product.

You can buy the solution outright to avoid ongoing licensing costs.

We are resellers of the solution.

As resellers, sometimes how easy or hard the solution is to deal with and set up depends on the customer requirements. It's really subject to what a customer wants in their environment.

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.

We are using HPE Nimble Storage of backing up our data.

HPE Nimble Storage is quick to release updates that fix bugs or problems and the failover has been good.

The solution could improve by having more granularity. For example, having the ability to go deeper into specific IO channels or specific latency issues that can happen would be a benefit. HPE has this ability on their side but it would be useful to have it on our side.

Replication reporting is a bit difficult to figure out and could improve in the future. It would be helpful if they had a breakdown detailed report that one could provide to upper management.

I have been using HPE Nimble Storage for approximately 

The support is very good at being proactive in helping us resolve issues. They have been better than most other competitors in this area.

It is a sound solution and we have not had many issues.

I rate HPE Nimble Storage a nine out of ten.

InfoSight. It's AI for the data center. It's very easy. It does a lot of the work for the customer. That is why HPE bought InfoSight, so they could deploy it across all their other platforms as well. It's a big game-changer. It's one of the easiest things to talk about when you're working with a customer. Customers don't want to do a whole lot of troubleshooting themselves, and with InfoSight and the whole system, it helps to deal with all these issues.

From what I've seen personally, customers that have Nimble don't really switch away from it. When newer versions come out, they usually have everything in terms of all the support and all the additional components that might be needed to help.

With the newest models, you're getting decompression and dedupe on some of the entry-level models, and this fixes a lot of issues for customers. Therefore, I am not hearing anything at this point. They just released the newest version, and so far, it's going well.

It's stable. 

It is a scalable product. They just released Gen 5 a couple weeks ago, and there's a lot of ability, depending on the need. 

They have very good, high-level support. You deal with Level 3 technicians, so that is a key takeaway. Customers don't want to be triaged, jump from here to there, and be in the line for X amount of time. They want things done, and they want them done now. With Nimble, in my experience with it, this is where they has been beneficial.

For the Nimble product line, support is very strong. There is a lot of different information, but you get a lot of support with Nimble, and Level 3 technical support is a huge benefit for customers. Especially knowing that you receive it right off the bat, as opposed to going through all the stages. Support, coupled with the InfoSight, triages a lot of their issues.

I did not set it up myself, but based on conversations with some of our solution architects, it seems like it's a straightforward setup: out-of-the-box and easy to deploy.

I have had a lot of personal success with it. Our organization has had a lot of success with it. It has a very straightforward presentation. It does the job for a lot of customers, and it's a great enterprise solution for many of them.

Nimble is a secondary VMware environment in our organization, so it's not running mission-critical applications at this point or responsible for complex business needs.

When we initially bought it, Nimble helped improve our organization as that was when we went through and we virtualized everything. Nimble was the back-end SAN for everything.

Now that it's owned by HPE, all of my SANs are under one support organization.

I haven't thought about what I might want to see in a future release mainly because we're trying to figure out where we want to head next: if we want to go with the Synergy system or if we want to continue down the hyperconverged path.

I haven't had a service call on it for three years. I would say that is pretty good.

We were able to take on and add the second one with the first one fairly easily. The second one was actually in Cincinnati and we brought it to Arizona. We had them separated and now they're co-joined.

We haven't needed any technical support on the two Nimble SANs that we've had, for the last three years.

They're now coming up on six or seven years old. I think we got our money's worth.

I would rate Nimble an eight out of 10, with cost probably being the big factor. It was a little on the pricey side at the time that it was bought. I came in late to the game, it was already in place when I got to the company. But, going back over the documentation, it was probably a little pricey.

I feel most IT consultants, traditionally, would consider Nimble a mid-line or a starter-line, but I feel that they operate in an enterprise-class. I believe that especially their All Flash Arrays that came out, that was their new adaptation from their hybrid. We use an AF5000 in our environment, and we're getting almost 20-to-one performance compared to what we had with our traditional legacy stack, the EMC VMAX 10K.

I think HPE is headed in the right direction. From what I know, their management is actually putting Nimble on the forefront to be the leader, and I think that's where it belongs. To stay ahead of the game, they need to put Nimble in front and stay there, and ride that horse throughout.

It is stable for us, from a hardware standpoint.

We have been fortunate enough to deal with still with the Nimble engineers and not had to transfer over to HPE. Now if you were to ask me about the HPE support on the SimpliVity stack, I would have to say "failure to deliver."

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.

The setup was very, very simple. When we got our AF5000, no kidding, we had it up in production within two hours. If we were to take the similar setup, with the EMC VMAX, it took us over three months. Big difference.

The return on investment for us has been a tremendous asset. Before, we were on the legacy stack with the EMC and we just weren't getting our nightly batch jobs done on time, and that was having to run throughout the day. With Nimble, we have actually reduced that window from 12 hours to six hours, so we got a 50 percent return on investment, right off the bat.

I am actually here, at the HPE Discover 2018 conference, to find out what they plan on doing with Nimble in the future. We're also a user of the SimpliVity stack and I didn't feel that the roadmap for that has played out. We're here to see how the Nimble is going to play out. I'm very interested because we're coming up on a refresh cycle and we want to know whether we want to go down that path or not.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. I'm not being biased by any means. It checks all the boxes for us.

It's not that expensive and it really brings the latency down; that was the promise from their end and it really did.

Since we are using virtual desktop environments, we had to deal with boot storms and we solved this issue with Nimble.

For me, this product has everything I need in there. What could be improved is performance monitoring, i.e., if it can get even better than what it is now, I will be happy. For example, there should be an exact drilling down to any workload/any virtual machine/any identified issue. So, if an issue appears and there is latency, there could be a faster or easier way to know what the reason is and how we can resolve it with Nimble.

15 months

no issues

The product is very stable.

We are considering to scale it. We did consider it once and we might consider in the future as well. I had the impression that we can easily scale it.

very good

very good

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.

The setup was very easy, it was a matter of a couple of hours.

the vendor came here at the very beginning and set all up

I looked at the traditional products out there and did a comparison with Nimble as well. For example, we compared EMC Storage with NimbLe and I also did consider SimpliVity, at the time but for this specific workload, it turned out that Nimble had the best approach.

Absolutely, try it out. For me, it was very easy because Nimble offered us to try and buy. They just came, set up the box, and I had a whole month's time to try it; it worked perfectly. For me, it was really easy.