Nimble Storage was acquired by HPE in 2017. The enterprise flash array product line now goes by the name HPE Nimble Storage.
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Huawei OceanStor
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Huawei offers OceanStor Dorado, an all-flash storage system boasting a wide range of applications and versatility to meet the needs SMBs, larger enterprises, or vertical industry applications.
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.
We connect the Huawei OceanStor SAN device directly to the Huawei Fushion Servers, without using the SAN Switch, with 16 HBA cards in MESH topology. Each of the two controllers has four 16 HBA inputs under the name of SMART IO. In addition, there are two 8 GB extension ports. VMware virtual machines are running on hosts. Our ERP applications, critical DBs, and business applications are running in these. Again, we use another SAN under a different cluster in the disaster recovery section.
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.
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.
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.
When purchasing support for your Huawei OceanStor system, there are two support options offered by Huawei (i.e. Hi-Care and Co-Care). Huawei Hi-Care service is when Huawei responds to your technical requests for remote troubleshooting and advance hardware replacement in the shortest possible time. Hi-Care provides onsite technical support to help you maintain a more efficient and stable network environment and improve network productivity. Whereas, Huawei Co-Care service is a collaborative solution delivered by Huawei certified partners. Depending on the capability of your Huawei support partners, I would recommend Hi-Care for mission-critical environments since this ensures Huawei takes responsibility for meeting the support SLAs. If you have very capable Huawei support partners, then Co-care could be a more cost-effective support option.
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.
All Flash NVMe SSD technology is currently at the top of this business. Its disk structure is hundreds of times faster than traditional mechanical SAS systems, but also compared to today's SSD systems! It has a much more affordable price than the devices of the same class. In addition to these, we had a lot of hesitation when we decided to give up the competitor brand and buy a product that works reliably and smoothly, but we researched and learned very well. We made the right choice.
