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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StarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
Score 9.0 out of 10
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StarWind SA helps organizations with fixed compute platforms meet storage performance and capacity growth requirements by providing them with high-performance and scalable storage covered by 24/7 support. StarWind Storage Appliance is designed to handle high-performance or unpredictable data growth. It serves storage as a single namespace to different environments via multiple uplink protocols: iSCSI, SMB3, NFS, including RDMA-capable iSER and SMB Direct. As an all-flash hyperconvergence…
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.
It is well suited in data transfer and storage of files under secure environment. It has contributed to immediate Return on Investment with low cost performance. I totally recommend it to any company for its high speed performance under secure data channels. It does reliable reporting on data integration and analysis on daily basis pointing out areas that have challenging operations.
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.
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 not been able to work with same featured product in our organization, however the performance of this platform has been excellent. The support center has been reliable and trustworthy giving us 100% support on daily basis when we deach them. It is affordable to any business enterprise that is ready to implement data storage and transfer programs. The maintenance and scalable cost is reasonable and and the services has been great.
