EMC XtremIO Flash Storage (discontinued) vs. HPE Nimble Storage vs. Pure Storage FlashArray

XtremIO would be useful for any production storage environment, or even any staging or development environment where performance mattered. It would not be ideal to use for backup storage.

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

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.

Incentivized

• The deduplication and compression is very good. This especially helps for VDI applications.
• It is easy to setup and map hosts to volumes.
• The new HTML5 console is much better than the older Java.

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

• The Pure Array does data reduction particularly well. We've seen a 7x reduction on some of our volumes.
• It is easy to get used to the system after coming from other storage arrays.
• It has some welcome additions such as a smartphone app that makes it easier to view your cases, etc.

Incentivized

• Its expensive but worth it

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

• 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 .
• Seriously, I have nothing else.

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

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.

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

From the day our first array was put in (2017) we have had very little issues using it the way we wanted to and none of the setup or processes we incorporate this into have ever been complex. All of the interfaces in the GUI are very intuitive and do not require any CLI experience to do what we need it to do.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

This was one area of real disappointment. EMC support was very slow to schedule work like installations and upgrades. Break/fix support was fairly standard. After the Dell merger, things have started improving but there is a lot left to be desired here.

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

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The install was very quick. The engineer that Pure sent said that if we started by 10 am we would be done by lunchtime, and he was not kidding.

Incentivized

I/O delievered by XtremIO can't be compared with any other flash storage. Existing relationship with vendor and pressure to improve I/O bottleneck was the key objective

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

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.

Incentivized

The product suite scales well and the FA in particular can service any need for all but the most demanding file protocol environments

Incentivized

• Using XtremIO has made our VDI much more palatable for users.

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

• 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.

Incentivized