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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NetApp ONTAP Data Management Software
Score 8.8 out of 10
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NetApp's ONTAP Data Management Software is a storage and data management and protection solution. ONTAP 9 allows users to build an intelligent hybrid cloud that is the foundation of a NetApp Data Fabric that spans flash, disk, and cloud. Flexibly deploy storage on a choice of architectures—hardware storage systems, software-defined storage (SDS), and the cloud—while unifying data management across all of them.
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.
I have highly benefited from the performance of this great tool. Storage and data management programs have been running as planned since we deployed this system. Under NetApp ONTAP Data Management Software our data and customers contacts are always secure. It has helped our company in reducing storage costs as we can safely use cloud storage services. It gives us continuity guarantee even after our systems fail to function due to strong backup system.
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.
More details on network interfaces are available in CLI. Would like to see similar visibility on the GUI.
Deleting volumes that have been snapmirrored have to be released at the snapmirror destination first. Would be nice to have that feature at the source where you are deleting the volume.
When creating a volume in the GUI it adds to the default junction point. Would be nice to choose the junction point as you were creating the volume (this is a feature available in the CLI).
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.
NetApp support is always second to none. That being said I have never once had to contact support for the NetApp System Manager software. It is simple, stable and easy to use. Given that their support is stellar in all other areas I don't see how this would be any different
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.
I have only used NetApp ONTAP Select platform in our organization in data storage and file management. It has efficiently managed all data-related problems and gives us the right roadmap of managing data from all sources effectively. Data migration from our company to the cloud storage datasets has been easy and secure. It provides reliable intelligence from all information gathered from our data sources that enhances better operations and smart decisions.
Previously were were running with just locally attached storage across all of our estate. With this tool we are not able to simplify the management of storage saving on resource usage across our Ops teams allowing us to focus on "more important" tasks.
