HPE Nimble Storage vs. IBM Storage FlashSystem

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HPE Nimble Storage
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Nimble Storage was acquired by HPE in 2017. The enterprise flash array product line now goes by the name HPE Nimble Storage.N/A
IBM Storage FlashSystem
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
IBM Storage FlashSystem, an all-flash storage array, delivers ~2 PB of effective capacity per single rack unit. Engineered with unique FlashCore Modules, it offloads data services including compression, encryption, deduplication, and ransomware threat detection ensuring optimum performance and resiliency.
$14,200
Pricing
HPE Nimble StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HPE Nimble StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsEntry-Level IBM Storage FlashSystem: For any organization looking for an all-flash array with features that are both enterprise conducive and budget friendly, the small to entry level offering prices from IBM begin at $18,400. Mid-Range IBM Storage FlashSystem: For businesses wanting to take advantage of an enterprise-quality flash array for critical workloads (such as SQL databases, SAP, ERP, CRM, etc.), list prices start at $104,600. High-Performance IBM Storage FlashSystem: Organizations seeking a storage array with the ability to run multiple instances of critical applications that are both performance intensive and capacity sensitive, can find IBM prices starting at $368,500. Contact IBM for configuration and pricing details.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HPE Nimble StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Considered Both Products
HPE Nimble Storage

No answer on this topic

IBM Storage FlashSystem
Chose IBM Storage FlashSystem
IBM Flash systems spectrum virtualize stands up against the software. Its data reduction algorithms are more efficient and reliable than hoped. Also, its replication capabilities are easier to manage, configure, and understand from an administrator's point of view. Also, IBM's …
Chose IBM Storage FlashSystem
1. Cost effective and flexibility in choosing among wide range of portfolios
2. Better virtualisation capabilities with hybrid model and on-prem setup
3. Cloud management tools and softwares to manage easily.
Features
HPE Nimble StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
HPE Nimble Storage
8.7
12 Ratings
3% below category average
IBM Storage FlashSystem
8.8
151 Ratings
2% below category average
Flash Array Performance8.011 Ratings9.4147 Ratings
Flash Array Integration10.010 Ratings8.5143 Ratings
Data Compression10.011 Ratings8.5146 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades10.012 Ratings9.4139 Ratings
Simplicity9.012 Ratings8.3148 Ratings
Power Savings5.011 Ratings8.4141 Ratings
Best Alternatives
HPE Nimble StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 8.5 out of 10
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 8.5 out of 10
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HPE Nimble StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(28 ratings)
9.4
(150 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(1 ratings)
7.6
(6 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.9
(22 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(21 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(5 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
HPE Nimble StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Likelihood to Recommend
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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.
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IBM
Top choice for IBMi integration. In general, it's a very good solution for quite a lot of customers. If you need a 3 site replication solution (HA + DR) maybe it's not the best solution, unless you use SVC. FlashCore Modules have very powerful compression rate, while mantaining good performance: high IOPS rate and really low latency
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Pros
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • 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.
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IBM
  • Extremely fast storage
  • Scales up as needed. Add flash core modules easily and increase volumes very quickly.
  • Applying firmware updates to IBM Storage FlashSystem is very easy to do and can be done without any downtime.
  • Replication policies are very versatile and also easy to setup.
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Cons
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • 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.
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IBM
  • Definitely we need to be able to extend a volume that is part of a mirror pair or Policy-Based Replication(PBO) on the fly.
  • Expansion of mirrored volumes/volume groups should resynchronise only the changed data (Almost like making use of change-volumes) and not trigger a full resync.
  • Please allow us to select downloading drive microcode also from Fix Central directly onto the flashsystem like with updates.
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Likelihood to Renew
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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.
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IBM
As flash technology evolves rapidly, vendors should [adapt] to the changes and onboard them in their products. IBM is a bit slow in adopting advanced technology in [its] portfolio. Even though the current product is good, my decision is purely based on how the transformation of the product [is] being produced and supplied to [the] end-user.
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Usability
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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.
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IBM
The integration into our SVC and the midrange systems are very well working. We do use cross site replication and global mirror which in turn is easy setup and the consistency groups are well maintained. The storage does global mirroring but also internal cross room replication as well. The integration of cloud object storage also helps in tiering the overall system.
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Reliability and Availability
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM Flashsystems is always available for me, it is fiberchannel storage without the fuzz of what iscsi brings. It is a very reliable storage system, I have almost never issues with this system. The only things which go wrong are the updates because the old updates which have been staged on the disks are not properly cleaned in my opinion.
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Performance
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
No answers on this topic
IBM
Latency and throughput have been excellent. The compression is done natively on the NVME modules so we do not see an impact there. the distributed parity does not seem to impact write speeds at all. We have found database performace has increased quite a bit over our old hybrid storage solution.
Having a single tier of performance makes it easy to set up SLAs for workloads.
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Support Rating
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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.
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IBM
Sometimes the knowledge of the support agent is quite limited and the support always has to route through the level 1 agent to screen all the informtion provided. Then its esclated to the next level support with the all collected data . The logs are always uploaded along wiht the case but still its reviewed at the lower level and then escalated / handed over to the next level if its complex issue to solve.
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Online Training
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
No answers on this topic
IBM
THe training is often selfpaced and easy to follow if you have worked previously with other storage products. The content is clear and contains all the information needed for an admin to learn. However the troubleshooting part is not always included and this is dependent on forums or other sources where the information is not accessible very easily.
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Implementation Rating
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
No answers on this topic
IBM
I was amazed by the way IBM Flash storage provides a huge amount of storage within the limited footprint, it helped us to replace big fat storage arrays, which aided in the process of moving towards lower hardware, carbon, and energy consumption footprint. We can comfortably say that Flash helped us to host applications fast with a blazing speed and user transactions are quite quick.
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Alternatives Considered
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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.
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IBM
For the past six months, we have been utilizing this technology in our projects to manage a massive workload and produce swift business outcomes on a crucial production database. The IBM FlashSystem 7200, which offers high performance and compression, has so far been a great experience for us. The results and functionality of this product have delighted our consumers.
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Scalability
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
No answers on this topic
IBM
We have been able to scale this storage system whenever there has been requirement for additional capacity and performance. with the help of deduplication we have been able to build quite a robust environment.
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Return on Investment
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • 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.
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IBM
  • the compression in line means the IBM flashcore allow us to store much more information with less capacity, we can store much more with fewer disks
  • virtualization allows us to extend the useful life of old equipment that we already had separated, as I said, I use them as a repository for backups
  • With the implementation of the new functionality of immutable copies with SafeGuarded Copies, the information is much more secure for possible attacks
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ScreenShots

IBM Storage FlashSystem Screenshots

Screenshot of IBM FlashSystem 5300Screenshot of IBM FlashSystem 9500Screenshot of IBM FlashSystem 7300Screenshot of IBM FlashSystem 5000