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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Oracle ZFS
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is designed to power diverse workloads so users efficiently consolidate legacy storage systems and achieve universal application acceleration and reliable data protection for data.
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.
For scenarios where the implementation is an Oracle ecosystem and the need for high-performance storage is present, undoubtedly the ideal solution is Oracle ZFS due to the native integration that exists, for example, with SPARC equipment, Exadata, and traditional architecture running Oracle Linux or Solariums (depending on the case), as well as in highly demanding industries in terms of storage.
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.
Software RAIDZ. Create storage arrays using best available RAID technologies for excellent disk stability
Array images and backups. Allows administrators to instantly create disk snapshots, to minimize time disk is unavailable (on the order of seconds, not minutes or hours).
Automatic de-deduplication/compression. ZFS will automatically de-dedup data on disk, allowing for more efficient use of the entire disk for unique data. It will also automatically compress data stored on the disk, allowing for even more usage of the available disk space. Great for infrequently accessed backups (There is some performance cost to compression).
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.
Because it was due to a software originally designed for Solaris. configuration in other environments can be cumbersome for inexperienced implementers.
The proprietary particularity of this File System makes it in some cases very difficult to implement in highly heterogeneous environments.
I think that additional forms of integration with more environments should be created.
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.
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.
ZFS is so far beyond the other filesystems available right now, offering full suites of tools for data management, backup, recovery, maintenance, monitoring, etc. It's not even fair to compare them.
In highly transactional and data-intensive environments such as 200 million records per month or more.
Banking also represents an ideal niche for this type of implementation due to its high volume of data and the need for security in this industry with over 100 million records per day and online history maintenance for more than 10 years (in most cases).
The Return on Investment or ROI is clearly seen in the medium term since your storage solution would be in your safekeeping without having to pay anything additional to regular maintenance.
