DDN offers the IntelliFlash flash array storage option based on technology developed by Tegile. The solution was owned and supported by Western Digital since August 2017, and later acquired by DDN (DataDirect Networks) in 2019.
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HPE Nimble Storage
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Nimble Storage was acquired by HPE in 2017. The enterprise flash array product line now goes by the name HPE Nimble Storage.
Nimble was way easier to set up initially, simpler to present volumes and WAY simpler to set up replication on. We got rid of 2 Tegile arrays that we're only 18 months old due to their poor design and clunky software.
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.
SMB business Tegile pricing and performance is particularly well suited. BC/DR scenarios are also enhanced as they are extremely good at upgrading each side and failing over for upgrades. I don't know any situations where these would not be appropriate.
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.
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 would like to see every update to be able to be reached via either partial or full updates. In the past we had progressed to one level of software and then found we could not get to a later version from that level, though they did address that.
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.
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 just works, and works very well. The GUI is clean and easy to understand, and the dashboard gives vital information at a glance. It also gives a very comprehensive view of what all the moving parts are doing. It is so clear and matches the view in real life that I can have a non-technical person looking at it and talking to me on the phone and we both see the same things, instantly.
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.
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.
We used to have both Nimble and Compellant in the past, and there is no comparison with the Tegile offerings. The Tegiles outperform them in every area and are easier to use.
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.
