AWS CodeArtifact vs. HPE Nimble Storage

We have a small team with limited resources and it worked well for us. Hence I can conclude that AWS Code Artifact are well suited for organizations which have limited resources in terms of hardware and access to administrators for setting up artifact repository in-house. AWS Code Artifact is also suited particularly well for organization(s) which are already using AWS Services/Infrastructure (eg. EC2) . It works quite well with existing AWS services and completes the gap which existed in AWS offering for quite some time. Organizations can move their entire DevOps toolchain and infrastructure to Amazon. It is less appropriate for organization(s) which rely on artifacts like Debian, C/C++, Go etc as AWS does not support those fully.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Code Artifact is a cloud based artifact repository so there is no installation required.
• Code Artifact comes with out of the box security. Using RBAC and encryption
• Total cost of usage is less than setting up in-house servers
• It is accessible from any where.. so no additional network setup is required.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• CodeArtifact does not support packages like debian. It will be nice to see them support that.
• Does not provide security scanning of the packages
• Lacks support for third party CI/CD toolchain like Jenkins

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Almost perfect, some hoops to jump through after major upgrade, but overall simple and effective. Our storage administrator really likes the integration with vmware as it makes his life easier. Also it was no trouble integrating it with our active directory credentials. The only issue we had was getting the plugin in VMWare going initially.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

AWS CodeArtifact is an excellent choice for organization(s) which are looking to move their infrastructure and devops toolchain to Amazon. It is very useful for teams/organizations on limited budget or do not want to take on infrastructure and maintenance costs associated with the artifact repository. Other software solutions require resources for setting up and need ongoing maintenance.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Overall CodeArtifact has positive ROI on the our team. We had limited budget for procurement of server/administrators. With CodeArtifact we were able to get some savings.
• We were able to deliver faster hence customers were quite happy. That led to customer satisfaction
• We didnt have to invest on maintaining network infrastructure/uptime and security. That saved us quite a bit of hassle and funds.

Incentivized

• 100% uptime 4 years and counting in a 24/7 environment.
• Long hardware support lifecycle, with extremely affordable maintenance renewal plans that provide real value.
• Nimble has been the most cost-effective SAN solution I have ever deployed.
• The inital costs, ongoing maintenance, and administration requirements were all 50% less than EMC and NetApp.

Incentivized