The management software that runs in the cloud is called InfoSight and it is very good. It is similar to machine learning software that monitors your hardware.

It's very easy, very compatible, and user-friendly. 

You don't have to do anything. When you power up, it'll ask you a couple of questions. For example, what IP address is required, the name, and how many partitions or, if you don't do the partition, just go for the IP addresses. 

It has a power backup network card and everything.

You don't have to go directly to the storage to create anything. It's automatically from the VM or any other software. Whatever you are using, you just create storage over there or in space, and it automatically creates it in the Nimble.

It has SSD cache and it has a physical drive as well. It is fast. It'll automatically sense your data. Whatever data you are pulling frequently, it'll store in that cache instead of storing directly on the hard drive to pull or store that. It is a very good feature.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It is scalable. 

It's stable. 

The most valuable feature of the solution is that HPE offers an integrated backup solution, which is very seamlessly integrated with HPE Nimble Storage, which is easy to configure and schedule. HPE Nimble Storage is considered to be a secured one. If a ransomware or enterprise-level attack happens, my infrastructure remains totally secure. If any virtual machine gets damaged or collapses, we have built a backup solution, which will take a minute to restore the same version of HPE Nimble Storage in our company.

The interaction with VMware is most valuable. 

Nimble's phone-home capability is decent. The compression, dedupe, and caching are also solid. Generally, I like the simplicity. It's almost a set-and-forget solution.

Regarding InfoSight, I have installed eight of them out of the 50 units we bought, and we have found, with the analysis, bad drives and we have been able to figure it out ourselves.

It's easy to use, it's just like 3PAR. I made clusters of 32 hosts with 50 volumes and that took barely an hour. I scripted a lot of it, filled in the names of volumes, the names of servers. It just spit it out and ran it and it was fine.

HPE Nimble Storage uses the InfoSight platform and it is useful because we can identify the faults and can analyze the performance. It has many other features. This feature is the best that I have observed from HPE Nimble Storage.

The interface of the solution is good.

The most valuable feature for our organization is that the solution provides us access to the storage we need without having to have multiple storage experts on staff to address changing storage needs.

The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies.

Performance, reliability, InfoSight, the ability to upgrade the O/S on the SAN without taking it down, and cost.

Poor performance and reliability would adversely affect my company’s productivity, and thus would increase overall labor costs as people took longer to do their jobs. (Especially if and when critical systems were down due to an outage.) It would also negatively affect employee and customer perception of the quality of IT services.

InfoSight is extremely valuable, because it gives us (IT) a direct understanding of historical performance and capacity trends, including projected utilization based on those trends. This in turn allows us to perform capacity planning before we reach the point where it becomes an issue. Further, some of the information in InfoSight gives us a direct understanding of which of our virtual servers is the most I/O bound. That allows us to investigate the server and mitigate disk traffic through configuration changes at the server level.

Regarding uninterrupted upgrades, one of the biggest problems with upgrading SANs is the fact that (except for Nimble!) you have to take down the SAN to do so. This requires the quiescence of any servers relying on that storage, and thus a service stoppage. While this can be done on a scheduled basis as “scheduled downtime”, the fact that Nimble permits us to upgrade transparently WITHOUT service interruption not only improves perceptions of IT, but it also changes what is normally a multi-hour process into a 30 minute process… saving time and money.

We like the performance.

It’s an excellent solution. The failure rates are minimal.

It’s easy to set up.

It's a very easy solution. Whenever I have a question, I find they have already provided a solution for it. For example, I want to sort out backups so that I offload some data off the Nimble since I don't want online to be clogged. They'll tell you we've got storage which is where you write your backup, which one is a partner where you can back up this information, get Veeam to store the backup, and then you can configure and send it to the storage if I want to run high availability.

They have really thought through their solution. They've covered everything.

Even their support is great. We have a support contract, so when there's an escalation on the system, you even see an email from them telling you that you have this issue. They do respond quickly and help you resolve your daily from the log. They’ll say: “This is the issue. Do this.” It's so easy to work with.

It's very stable and fast, and I am very happy with the deduplication. It saves a lot of space, which is great.

We use a platform as a service and have multiple application vendors who comprise that platform. There are moments when those application vendors put the blame on us. By working in InfoSight, I am able to say, "No, it is not us." I can actually provide proof, either by using screenshots or through reporting. 

The most valuable feature is InfoSight, and the ability that InfoSight gives you, from insight within your environment to what is going on at the storage layer. Also, since we use this product integrated with VMware, we are able to have a view of our virtual infrastructure segregated up to the VM level. We are able to see where the most IOPS are located, etc. Therefore, we are able to prevent and predict where things are going well or badly.

Our upgrades are seamless. Whether we're adding storage, or upgrading the software, we don't take an outage for those upgrades.

Also, InfoSight does exactly what it needs to do. It tells us when we have problems and if we need to move things around. Mostly we use it for capacity planning so we can get the forecast of when we're going to be out of space and order more disk expansion before we run out of actual space.

InfoSight is a valuable feature. It enables 24/7 monitoring and administration of our storage. Whenever there is a fault, the user will be alerted. It is a 100% customer satisfaction-based experience. Everything is on the dashboard.

Speed versus storage space is the most valuable feature.

• Simplicity of use
• Maintenance

The performance and simplicity are the most valuable features. We originally moved from NetApp, which in our opinion was an extremely complicated system to learn. It was not intuitive at all, whereas everything about Nimble Storage is intuitive, hence their name. All their online documentation is easy to read and easy to follow. All their online sales information is transparent and usually done by a third party instead of by themselves. As far as the performance, they're able to get much better performance with normal spinning disks. We've always had spinning disks in our storage solutions, but they're able to get better performance out of the typical spinning disk, just by the way they've written their software on the back-end. Then for solid-state drives, they can get better performance through read operations through the data.

Having all-flash with two banks of disk for population is great for expansion. InfoSight is always one of the best out there for array reporting and troubleshooting.

The tool’s support is feasible.

The capacity for data storage and compression is good.

We have over 100 terabytes of storage, and it is all solid state. That is pretty valuable for everything we do.

The build alone is amazing and the way everything is modular. It's swapable. 

The storage capacity efficiency is phenomenal. It is off the charts in comparison to the compression ratios that we got before. We are able to save a lot more to the device.

The device works very well.

We like how we can report and access everything directly over the cloud.

The solution runs pretty fast.

The most valuable features of this solution are it's reliability and the redundancy that it provides. This is also a good product from a financial perspective.

The performance of this solution allows us to have real-time access for SQL databases.

Basically, InfoSight has been tremendous, together with the support process; the way it proactively sends communication back to the support center, the proactive dispatch of parts, I think has been impressive. InfoSight and the support model really looks very rich in Nimble.

Ease of installation, it's very easy to set up, to get up and running. It works well, I don't have any issues with it. Also, they have unparalleled customer support. You call in and you talk to a technician who knows what he's doing and can typically solve your problem on that call.

I use InfoSight quite a bit. It works well. It allows you to get some insight into what's happening in your environment immediately, instead of having to send things off and having them analyzed and sent back to you.

InfoSight, for sure, has been the best feature so far.

The vCenter integration is very good. I can not only see what each of my iSCSI presentations look like from a performance standpoint, I can see the snapshots, I can shrink, grow, modify, or delete them as well. In addition to that, InfoSight is a great tool to look at the "big picture" when planning what you want to do next with your Nimble Storage.

The fact that you can manage the requirements is one the most valuable features of HPE Nimble Storage. The other is the rapid deployment time.

Our customers are also happy that they can easily manage the requirements from the very beginning.

• Reliability
• Performance
• Cost

The solution's uptime is fantastic. It's 100 percent. In addition, Nimble's storage capacity efficiency is very effective.

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

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.

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.

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.

Performance and support are its most valuable features.

The uptime has been solid.

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.

• Zero downtime
• Very easy installation
• Easy upgrades

• 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.

• 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

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

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

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.

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.

The most valuable feature is the NVMe flash storage.

I really like the form factor, which is nice and compact and small. 

We do use Infosight, but it does not greatly affect us because we are one hundred percent Hyper-V, and the analytics are not yet released for that environment. I know that they are coming later this year.

The storage capacity efficiency is very good. 

• Scalability
• User interface
• Reporting

Deduplication and compression.

The built-in performance profiles have made tweaking settings for different uses (SQL log files, SQL data files, VMware datastores, etc.) extremely simple. The built-in profiles are more than enough for most implementations, and if you need to create a custom performance profile, the process is simple and well documented. The analytics available via Infosight (The online Nimble support portal) are extremely well written and useful too. In particular, I find the analytics extremely useful when tracking down causes of latency that occasionally crop up and affect processing.

Ease of use with the hardware and software GUI. Easy firmware upgrades. The performance for the price is extremely valuable.

The hardware is simplistic. The physical wiring of the controllers, upgrading controllers, and adding expansion shelves or cache. The software GUI lays everything out nice and clean. You are able to intuitively find what you need to accomplish in few clicks. The reporting is excellent. The firmware upgrades are easy. Just click and sit back and relax. They are non-invasive and take minimal time. The performance is on par with some of the other solutions that cost much more.

• 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.

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.

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. 

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

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.

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

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.

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

The solution provides all the essential features for various project requirements.

The performance and the processor are good.

HPE has very good technology in terms of storage, and they have very good support assistance.

The valuable features include encryption of data, hybrid performance, firmware updates, and overall simplicity.

• Extremely low write latency (for SQL Server)
• High performance
• Automatic QoS (~60 VMs on single array)

The most valuable features are snapshot & replication. The snapshot is straightforward in terms of how you can easily manage your backup schedule based on your RPO & RTO. You can instantly recover your data in a minute when you need it from a specific point in time. The replication was very reliable and efficient for our customers because you can just replicate your data with a minimum 2 Mb bandwidth.

You know, here in the Philippines, internet bandwidth is one of the most critical concerns and with Nimble, bandwidth wasn't an issue for you to have a reliable disaster recovery setup (DR site) and amazingly, Nimble doesn't charge you any additional license cost no matter how big the data that you need to replicate.

High-availability, performance, compression, cost to performance ratio and InfoSight. We’ve increased our performance, removing disk-latency errors in our SQL environments, and provide more information with InfoSight. We are seeing 60% compression on our legacy data.

The most valuable features are -

1. Ease of setup

2. Ease of Management with Web UI

3. InfoSight - analytics sight that collects data for all Nimble arrays deployed

InfoSight has been very valuable in determining upgrade requirements, bottlenecks, etc. The latest update to the site now allows Per-VM monitoring within the Virtual Infrastructure now too.

The deduplication and compression capabilities are powerful. We see deduplication savings ratios at ten to one, and twenty to one.

Two things. 

• One is their support. You always get through to somebody who knows exactly what they're talking about. 
• The fact that once you've bought, any updates are just part of your subscription, so you don't have to buy add-ons for new features. You're continually adding value to it.

It's a fairly simple-to-manage platform. We had a situation in the past where we had more storage platforms than we had storage engineers. We've managed to cut that down, which is good. 

It is cost-effective, which is important for a service provider, because you're competing with hyper-scale providers who do things at extremely large scale, who tend to kill you on price if you're not careful. 

Definitely ease-of-use. I've experienced many different arrays out there and Nimble is definitely there. The analytic side is very helpful on their info site. Integration with VMware is easy. There are not any additional appliance plug-ins to load beyond the basics. It works well.

The Nimble solution gives us hybrid storage at an affordable cost. We use it in our corporate IT environment. It's fast relatively easy to implement.

• Hybird configuration
• SSD Cache

These features keep the cost per IO and Gig low while giving very good performance. We have multiple database servers on the SAN that require low latency for optimal performance. This configuration allows us to run the database without over allocating memory to them.

InfoSight is such a wonderful tool and given us insight we’ve never had into our storage environment.

The ‘insight’ into our equipment is fantastic. And their support is old-school, which means that they do an awesome job at being proactive.

InfoSight is such a wonderful tool and given us insight we’ve never had into our storage environment.

Being able to forecast growth and analysis at this level is not possible on our NetApp without a significant investment.

The SSD caching and the snapshots within the array are unlike any other product I've ever worked with. Restoring VM's is VERY simple.

Remote replication for disaster recovery is the primary use of the array. As we get further along in our implementation and are more familiar with the product, we intend to use the cloning features to create development and test environments.

HPE Nimble Storage's best features are that it's stable and user-friendly.

In general, the solution works great. We haven't had any issues with it.

It's very reliable. Even if one control fails, it automatically turns on the other controller and everything moves from one to the second instantaneously without any issues.

The product is quite robust.

• Ease-of-use: You don't have to be a storage expert to navigate and set up the product.
• Reliability: If there are any issues with the product, their support team calls me before I even notice that there is an issue. They're very proactive.

Before HPE bought Nimble, we had a couple of customers that use it quite extensively, not just for storage of data, but also as their backup solution as well. So, we have found the advantage of it is the easy, rapid setup, but also that it is very easy to manage. 

Their remote management and understanding when things are starting to go wrong and their ability to fix them before the customer even knows, this has been a big positive when a customer makes the decision to go with Nimble.

• Easy management (and easy management during the lifetime of the product) translates into savings. Therefore, it’s important for us.
• Speed and price: Nimble Storage is simply the most speed and space for the least price. No other product comes close.

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).

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

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.

It is easy to use. Not too complicated.

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.

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. 

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

InfoSight is helpful because it is proactive support.

• Availability
• Ease of use
• Performance

InfoSight: It lets us see what we might have to prepare for in the future. This feature has been a big help, especially since we have been recently looking to move on as our contract is almost up.

The most valuable features are ease of administration, stability, performance and customer support.

The SAN’s interface is easy to navigate. The processes to accomplish a task seem to have been constructed using the least number of clicks.

Performance of the SAN has been great due to the software algorithms for flash/spinner data writes/reads.

I have found the convergence rate and deduplication the most valuable features.

The solution is very fast. It has a replication from Nimble A to Nimble B, which is a high-speed connection.

The solution is quite scalable.

The stability is very good.

It's quite easy to use and the performance is quite good.

Some of the beneficial features I have found are the Block-level backups, the interface is easy to use, backups work well and the portal is functional.

• Simplicity, ease of upgrade of software (no downtime)
• Performance Integration with Commvault
• InfoSight reporting
• Support – World Class
• The Web GUI interface is easy to use and self-explanatory. From the Web GUI you can register the array plugin to vCenter and from within the VMWare Client and the Web Client you have array integration to allow you to Clone Snapshots and present the clone to the ESXi hosts in a couple of mouse clicks. This feature allows VM power users with the appropriate permissions (set in vCenter) to Clone, Snapshot, Expand, delete and even change the Nimble Protection (Snapshot) schedule without needing array logon credentials or needing to go onto the array Web GUI. Commvault recognizes the Nimble arrays through it’s API so we can trigger app consistent snapshots for various products like MS SQL, Oracle, My SQL,Exchange …. The list is expansive. Nimble do provide Exchange and MS SQL out of the box also. There is also a Nimble Connection Manager for VMware (NCM) that automatically set the Path Selection Policy optimized for VMware ESXi/Nimble performance.

This product is very easy to set up.

The design of the hardware and software lends itself to great performance and redundancy.

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

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.

The most valuable feature is data mirroring.

The documentation is good.

• Reliability
• Monitoring
• Support is brilliant

• 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

• 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.

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

Flexible scaling for future-proof and Nimble InfoSight, easy and clear to use reporting portal.

• Scale up
• Scale out
• Compression
• Analytics

The single feature that is valuable is InfoSight and the visibility it gives us for our capacity planning.

Easy to configure and view information of the system's health.

We do not need a dedicated staff member to handle the system we deploy. A regular infrastructure person that attends the Nimble training course will be able to handle the system.

It provides good performance, ease of use and ease of administration. The usage statistics, the cloud and their info site are all very good.

All features.