Smaller sites that would benefit from a cluster of 2-5 nodes. Not saying that it can't scale above that, but I find HyperFlex a great solution for those sites. A simple 3-node edge cluster can provide a huge amount of resources and redundancy. It's also really easy to scale the environment to meet growth requirements.
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.
UCS manager in HX is truly helping us in doing one touch firmware upgrades. Scaling of HX cluster (in few minutes) is too seamlessly due to service profiles.
HX does not hold you back by creating a single data store unlike other HCI products. With HX, you can create multiple data stores and allocate those to desired services. This help logically separate the install base on HX and removes confusion for the admins too.
We run high IOPs workload on HX, and we never felt latency issues due to the Cisco backbone (as you get FI as a TOR switch and options to choose 10G or 40G speeds).
With HX you truly enjoy a single window support from Cisco including for the top of the rack switch (FI in HX case). In other HCI infra, you certainly have to bank on to network switch vendor for support and bring HCI and switch vendor at one pane for troubleshooting latency related issues.
While we increased our footprint on HX, we didn't added additional administrators to support the landscape. This was possible because of the simplicity in managing HX clusters.
With HX we had setup stretched cluster between two near site data centres. This is a unique proposition in HX (we have 2 nodes in each data centre) and data centre failover works absolutely seamless.
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.
there is the problem with starting cluster where there are not outside DNS and NTP services so we need to workaround this with additional storage or hosting it on the local storage.. many clusters has internal DNS/NTP services not available from outside and they need to be hosted on the HX
there is not RBAC or user mgmt on the CVMs so it is difficult to not add full permission for the people responsible for just shutdown and power on the cluster
native snapshots support with ibm backup products
running from not the only last snapshot in all use cases
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.
More documentation is available now than when the product initially came out (which was an issue early on). Because it only supports UCS hardware, I think it does help with support issues. Nutanix has to support much more hardware. At the same time, you're dealing with the Cisco TAC, which can be mixed at times.
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.
HyperFlex is built on top of Cisco UCS infrastructure, which allows us to manage other non-HX servers attached to the same UCS environment. This allows us to tie everything together via Intersight and see all of the servers in our data centers. Other platforms don't really have a comparable offering.
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.
The simplified management makes it easier to operate and prevents mistakes.
Guided installation using the installer VM means you don't have to configure every component by hand. Improves deployment speed and lowers the risk of configuration issues.
Performance increase of 40-90% compared to our previous compute/storage cluster.
