The Main reason for choosing HPE Nimble Hybrid storage is the Cost. However, even though its not ALL Flash Storage it was still providing the high performance, Latency less than 2 ms, good compression and de-duplication, zeop downtime on software upgrade, good reporting through …
HPE Nimble compares well from a performance and storage perspective. It is easy to manage and maintain and there is adequate support with a 4hr Same Business Day response for parts. The unit is a little larger than AFA from competitors however it fits well in a 4U rack. Pure …
The expense and general cockiness of Pure Storage is what pushed me to Nimble. The guys at Nimble were laid back and had invited me to a bunch of events and I got to learn in a non-pushy environment about the technology that makes their devices tick. They were also there to …
All of the storage vendors we tested in a shoot-out performed pretty well, though I don't have the raw numbers. What sold us on Nimble is the service and support, which the others cannot touch.
Really the deduplication and compression ratio has been all over these guys. The speed on the flash storage seems more customized if I may say and our deployments were smooth. Nothing against these guys since we work with all at the same level, but there are very notable perks …
It was a very tight call before finalizing the solution. Since Pure Storage FlashArray was able to offer the best deal and the kind of relationship the pure engineer maintained with us during the entire POC journey made them unique compared with the other vendors and I strongly …
Comparable performance to nimble. The reason we selected Pure Storage for our ERP storage is that other companies in our field have had success with implementing it in AIX.
It beats them hands down on everything. It is faster with better compressions and dedup. Management is at the next level - not legacy at all. Upgrades are easier. Getting a unit online and working was faster, as was expanding storage. vCenter plug-in's are easier to use …
Performance and the guarantee were the main reasons to replace and move away from the other storage vendor. We looked at EMC, Netapp, HP all products owned within the company, and went with Pure, we went with it because of the simplicity of administration.
The Forever Flash offering from Pure is the deal maker. We will always have new controllers every 3 years and will not need to ever purchase new or upgrade our array.
Pure had a better cost offering and better sales process than the vendors above. They were also ranked higher on independent research such as Gartner which made the decision to go with Pure much easier.
These are all good systems in their own right, but there are two areas where Pure Storage FlashArray beats them all hands-down! First is management. The software interface for management and provisioning is cleaner and doesn't make one jump through complicated processes to …
We considered Nutanix HyperConverged systems, EMC XtremIO, NetApp SolidFire; evaluated HP Nimble All Flash & Hybrid, NetApp AFF series and VMware vSAN. The former 3 were ruled out for being too expensive and in some cases offering too little for too much money. The later did …
Nimble, NetApp and VSAN are all products that were evaluated and with which we had previous experience.
Nimble and NetApp at the time were both promoting hybrid systems rather than all flash. In both cases, we favoured all flash since it had become affordable and is much more …
NetApp, at the time, was more a hybrid approach as did not have the same level of features and capabilities in the all-flash array market, newer products have since been released to market that would make a closer comparison now, but three years ago this was not the case. Nimble,…
The FlashArray is faster and easier to use than all the other products I've used. Other ones are close, but from our perspective, Pure won in every area.
I have used Nimble all-flash arrays which are very similar. The Pure Storage FlashArray management interface is slightly better, however, Nimble was much better in terms of information available via the cloud monitoring and management via Inisight.
Nimble storage could not be clustered like Pure, Simplivity was completely converged so if one aspect of the design was under-specified it would require a full new node, Netapp only offered clustering with a special cost licence, whereas with Pure all functionality upgrades are …
Nimble is good for a mixed workload, but at the time it didn't have an all flash offering. Now there is no advantage to a rip and replace. They were the first into the hybrid space which was good for SMB, but didn't work at the enterprise level.
Pure started with all FlashArray since beginning of the company and Nimble was just changing from convectional spin disk to flash, so we selected Pure because of the length on the business with FlashArray SAN and the review and reputation we read about it.
Better price/usable storage, better performance, higher dedupe and compression, easy to use and self-explanatory GUI, good support, rack and stack and running in 4 hours were some of the reasons we selected Pure Storage.
HPE Nimble Hybrid storage is very cost effective that can provide the same Latency, I/O and Bandwidth compared with any other All FLASH storage which is 3 times expensive than this. From a feature comparison standpoint of view, there isn't much difference between Hybrid Vs ALL Flash. HPE Nimble Storage uses ALL Flash disk at the front end to process the data thus by reducing the cost by using a regular SAS disk at the back end. Its the software and the algorithm that HPE Nimble StorageE uses to achieve this. having said that, the overall data reduction, de-duplication and compression is above the mark as what the sales team promised initially. Overall, the storage is performing well without any challenges.
When you need speed, it's FAST, especially for MS SQL databases. If you are having bottlenecks, you can spend your time finding it in the code because it's not Pure Storage. Love the data reduction and duplication. We can store so much more on this unit than the base physical size. Love the data snapshots. When you need to complete copy your entire environment for testing etc. Nothing is easier, a few clicks and you are done. Extremely helpful for testing and training.
HP Nimble is basically an all in one SAN with SSD cache or in some cases fully SSD based however the thing it does the best is its front end GUI and user management capability making it easy for anyone to ramp up on managing it quickly.
The Nimble SAN is also very easily managed when it comes to hardware management. Outside of some major internal parts such as the mainboard, almost everything in the system is duplicated so single failures never bring the system down. Power supplies and drives are easily swapped out.
Nimble has incredibly capable and easily accessible support that is available 24/7.
The price point on Nimble, though higher than piecing together a home made SAN out of spare Windows Servers, is perfect even for some SMB's.
I'd like the GUI to include more information for some of the features such as replication data totals each night. You have to go to the command line for this.
It would be nice to have a feature built into the GUI that would show you the command line equivalent to get the same results you are seeing in the GUI.
Although the intial setup was easy, they could always improve on that portion. During my setup, I did have to do a lot of back and forth with research on their site as to what each setting was that I was setting up. They could have provided some sort of description for each field within the setup that would have made it easier to know what they were having us set up.
Reporting is too general. Being a tech nerd, I want to be able to see the nitty-gritty details. I also need to be able to define canned sets of reports for problem application systems.
Pricing is a bit higher then some of their direct competitors .
Nimble is doing its job well and any issues that do come up cause the Nimble support team to alert us before we would potentially see an impact to our production environment. I do wish we could expand into the unused space in the CS210 shelf which is limited by what I assume is a marketing/sales strategy, but we will likely add shelves moving forward.
It has so far been a very fast and stable product. We have had wonderful support when we have needed it and the account manager and engineer attached to our organization have been very responsive with any questions and concerns we have had.
The install went smoothly, and the engineer explained every step along the way. The next couple of days he checked in to make sure that migration was running as planned. The user interface is designed with usability in mind. You don't need a dedicated "Storage Silo" to manage this product. For smaller IT departments that need to support many different workloads, this could not be a better feature
We have never had an outage with Purestorage. Yes we have had 2 drives go out but replacements were installed so fast there wasn't any issues. We have had a NVRAM module replaced but were noticed from Pure they were sending a replacement because they were predicting a failure so pure was proactive preventing any issues. Knowing Pure is monitoring our device 24x7 gives us peace of mind.
The corporation has a very diverse data load and when we migrate from a hybrid storage to pure all-flash, significant gains have already been observed. Latency always remains below 1 ms regardless of the load and volumetry used. Application performance also depends heavily on whether or not the code is more permormatic and network access infrastructure. The product has been meeting expectations
Any time I have had to contact support, they have always been quick to respond, and very efficient in resolving any issues. When an action has been required on our side for a fix, they have been very helpful in explaining step by step what was required, and when replacement parts have been needed, we've had them within 24 hours.
Pure Support is timely and communicative. They are always ready to assist and very skilled at what they do, no matter the time of day. Even at 12:10 a.m. on New Years Day when your array has a hiccup that causes some errors in your environment, they will be on the phone with you in an instant. If they are unable to determine the cause right away, because things appear to be normal, they will take your environment's configuration, lab it up in their support environment and then research until they figure out what caused the problem. Even if it takes 3 months. True story.
Excellent training and really you don't need that much. We received training at the Pure offices and also on site when the product was installed. Simple things like how to login to the GUI interface, how to setup users, how to create volume and mount it. How to make a snapshot, how to copy it and mount it. Really is pretty self explanatory on how to do things with the GUI interface. We were expecting complicated base on other vendor products, we got super simple.
Great videos and documentation. There is a common theme with PureStorage, "Keep it elegantly simple". They have great support network and great support user groups. Documentation has been very helpful with providing auditors with methods and procedures on security and other ways the product works. Great documentation on setting PureStorage to be the most effective with VM's, SQL Server, and other products.
We used a Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage array for many years and it worked well. A big issue was that upgrading firmware required system downtime and during one upgrade I was unable to bring the systems back up afterwards. I spent several days on the phone over a holiday weekend with Dell and VMware support in order to get my systems back up and running. It made me very nervous about doing firmware upgrades after that.
Pure Storage FlashArray came up as being the most cost-effective of the lot plus the extras added like call-home support were very welcome. The competitors' options were a lot more expensive and the call-home support added a lot more to the already high costs.
Thanks to the deduplication that is built into the product we are seeing great reduction in total space required by consolidating similar data types on the same array.
Our users are very pleased with the performance.
The replication allowed us to move our workload from to another data center with minimal downtime.