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HPE Nimble Storage

HPE Nimble Storage

Overview

What is HPE Nimble Storage?

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Users have found several key use cases for HPE Nimble Hybrid storage. One common use case is offloading non-production data from their …
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Great product

10 out of 10
December 24, 2019
Incentivized
It is used as the primary and secondary Sans. I put it in 5 years ago and then last year we upgraded to an all-flash array with 2x the …
Continue reading
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Popular Features

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  • Non-Intrusive Upgrades (11)
    9.8
    98%
  • Simplicity (11)
    9.6
    96%
  • Flash Array Performance (10)
    9.6
    96%
  • Data Compression (10)
    9.6
    96%
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Product Demos

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI - Adding a new server using Stack Manager

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Managing HPE Nimble Storage using Stack Manager

YouTube
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Features

Enterprise Flash Array Storage

All-flash array storage is a solid state, high performance storage option.

9.5
Avg 9.1
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Product Details

What is HPE Nimble Storage?

HPE Nimble Storage Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Nimble Storage was acquired by HPE in 2017. The enterprise flash array product line now goes by the name HPE Nimble Storage.

Reviewers rate Non-Intrusive Upgrades highest, with a score of 9.8.

The most common users of HPE Nimble Storage are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(66)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Users have found several key use cases for HPE Nimble Hybrid storage. One common use case is offloading non-production data from their all-flash storage, resulting in cost reduction while maintaining the same level of performance. Another use case is using HPE Nimble Storage for primary and disaster recovery VMware datastores, allowing for quick and easy failover in case of a production site failure. Users have also reported that the Nimble storage device serves as the primary source of network-based storage, providing improved ease of management and performance compared to previous storage devices. Additionally, Nimble CS210 storage units have been used across organizations to enable snapshot backups and cross replication for disaster recovery. Overall, users have experienced improved performance, ease of management, and cost savings by utilizing HPE Nimble Hybrid storage for various use cases in their environments.

Intuitive User Interface: Users have praised the intuitive and user-friendly interface of Nimble Storage. They find it easy to navigate and manage the storage system, without requiring extensive training or technical expertise. The simplicity of the GUI-based interface has been specifically highlighted as a major advantage.

Excellent Customer Service: Nimble Storage's customer service and technical support have received high praise from users. Reviewers appreciate the knowledge and responsiveness of the support engineers who provide prompt assistance in resolving issues effectively. The proactive support approach, where Nimble reaches out to users before they even report an issue, has been particularly appreciated.

High Performance: Users commend the impressive performance of Nimble Storage. The all-flash storage system is described as exceptionally fast, with instant completion of storage operations. This high performance, combined with low latency, proves advantageous for applications that demand intense I/O operations.

Customization of Reports: Some users have expressed the need for an option to customize reports based on their specific customer needs. They feel that having this capability would greatly enhance their experience with the product.

Mapping Hosts in Storage: Several reviewers have found mapping HOSTS in the storage to be a tedious task, especially when there are more than 100 Hosts involved. This process can become time-consuming and complex, leading to frustration among users.

Lack of CLI Script Customization: Users desire custom CLI scripts to automate day-to-day activities but feel that the current options are not sufficient for their needs. They believe that having the ability to create and customize CLI scripts would improve efficiency and streamline their workflow.

Users commonly recommend the following when it comes to HPE Nimble Storage:

  • Attend free training classes to learn about storage setup and configuration.
  • Leverage a trusted Value Added Reseller for a successful implementation.
  • Use sizing tools to appropriately size the environment.

Users find HPE Nimble Storage easy to implement and praise the support staff. They believe that it is a cost-effective solution with world-class customer support. Additionally, many users highly recommend choosing HPE Nimble Storage over other competitors if budget allows, as they consider it a well-put-together product at a great purchase price.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 27)
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Jagmender Kharb | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
HPE Nimble Storage are currently being used in our pre-production environments for virtualization setup. This storage user interface are easy and replication policy also easy to implement.
  • Reporting and Monitoring
  • Good Technical support from vendor
  • Easy to manage
  • Speed and performance are good what we needed.
  • We did not face any major issue with this storage devices
HPE Nimble Storage are well suited for type of work and environments. This storage are easily manage the huge amount of data with high performance. This storage good for virtual environment, easy to implement the replication policy. This storage well suited for VMware Infrastructure usage include VDI deployment. We were able to spin up the hybrid storage as datastore in our VMware environment.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We added Nimble Storage part to replace Hitachi Storage solution which actually was the end of support life. The reason to buy Nimble storage was to expand our SAN and NAS requirement growing in our environment.
  • Reliable storage for VDI.
  • Scalability
  • Less complexity.
  • No dedicated sales team or support engineer.
Ease of deployment, management of Nimble web portal.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use HPE Nimble storage arrays in 5 different datacenters for our virtualized environments. They provide fibre channel block storage and datacenter to datacenter replication.
  • Infosight gives great information for executives and technicians alike.
  • Interface is simple
  • Reliable
  • multi-protocol implimentation
  • cost per feature
Performance overviews are very simple in the infosight dashboards. Replication an protection policies are easy to setup.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
we use the HPE Nimble Hybrid storage to offload some of the non production Data from the ALL FLASH storage to Nimble. Since expanding the all flash storage is not a cost effective solution, we decided to migrate all the non production Data/VM's to a Hybrid storage this maintaining a same level of IOPS, Latency and Bandwidth. Making this decision not only helped us in reducing the cost, but also helped in a good ROI without compromising on the performance of the infrastructure
  • All Flash similar Performance including Latency, I/O bandwidth
  • Integrates very well with the Vmware
  • zero downtime on firmware upgrades
  • Decent Reports
  • Would like to have a option to customize the reports based on the customer needs
  • Mapping HOSTS in the storage is a tedious task when there are more than 100 Hosts.
  • custom CLI scripts to automate the day-to-day activities
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently using HPE Nimble Storage for our primary and disaster recovery VMware datastores. These are setup as replication partners between our production site and our disaster recovery site to allow for quick and easy failover in the event of our production site becoming unavailable. Before using HPE Nimble Storage, we were relying on storing our backups in the cloud which would then require a long process to recover from in the event of a disaster.
  • Replicating between sites
  • Compressing data on volumes
  • Deduplicating data on volumes
  • Customer service
  • The feature set is pretty broad and could be overwhelming at first
HPE Nimble Storage has very impressive deduplication and compression built into their systems. There is really no need to configure anything as it is taking care of automatically at the firmware layer. If you are not planning on utilizing the replication between partners it may very well suite you to find a less expensive option, but this was a feature that we needed.
February 12, 2020

Jack Be Nimble

Sam Fowler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used two Nimble CS210 as storage across the whole organization. We were able to migrate 98% of our physical hardware to 2 Hyper-V clusters that were cross replicated between the Nimble units in two locations. By doing this, we had a snapshot solution for backups and cross replication for disaster recovery.
  • Ease of implementation
  • High performance
  • Single pane management for multiple units.
  • CIFS/NFS
Small organizations with enough budget and are in a full refresh project where they can justify the cost. Organizations only going through a partial refresh may not be able to justify the cost or have all of the hardware (network for iSCSI) to support the requirements.
December 24, 2019

Great product

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used as the primary and secondary Sans. I put it in 5 years ago and then last year we upgraded to an all-flash array with 2x the storage we had. It stored all the server virtual machines, and with the second one, it provided replication for all production high-level virtual machines.
  • Fast
  • Set and forget
  • Infosite took a bit to actually pull value out of it. Great overall.
  • Better documentation on what happens when data stores are deleted.
Pretty much any medium or high-performance applications and server hosting. I would use it where you need a traditional SAN. The models we had were the hybrid or all-flash. On the market, they have similar performance specs, but in real-time use, the all-flash array did laps around the hybrid flash one.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nimble is used as the core storage for our virtual infrastructure at two of our sites. The high availability and reliability of the hardware have meant that in the entire time we have been using it, we have never had any company downtime due to the Nimble storage. Due to the failover ability between the controllers, it also means that it can be kept up to date without needing to schedule in downtime each time, allowing us to be more secure.
  • Failover between controllers which enables high availability.
  • High speed access of data, all of our server applications can run easily using this storage.
  • Having more customisation for reports on storage would be useful in capacity planning- allowing for more granular views on storage usage over a set period of time (i.e. broken down by datastore, or even VM).
In an environment where high availability is key, Nimble is excellent. In the five years I've used it, it has never caused downtime for my company. Even when repairs, physical or software, have been required (which has not been often), the failover process between controllers has worked perfectly, and there has been no interruption to services hosted on the device.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nimble Storage to host our CSV and shared volumes among our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster Hosts. Each user at our company relies on it to serve data to them each day. When we first started considering a clustered approach virtual computer we needed to find something to host the VM's on such that they could be accessed by any clustered host and Nimble was the perfect solution for us.
  • 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.
  • The add on and upgrade parts for the system are a bit overpriced and if you buy your own third party they may try to not honor their warranty.
  • Setting up redundant Nimble boxes is not as well documented as it could be.
  • They are seeming to stop supporting some older devices a bit faster than they used too ALA Microsoft Windows and the way they are not handling version 10 though not as extreme.
HPE Nimble is well suited for any situation where a company wants a stand along or synced across the WAN San solution without needing to invest in too much training for the admins. Since they sell both partly SSD based cache devices as well as all SSD devices, they have the best of both worlds whether you need consistently fast storage with some front end cache or high-level box that is always serving up fast. As in our case, it is also well suited as a back end iScsi based box for cluster scenarios.

If a company is just looking for Standard hard drive storage then Nimble is overkill.
Omar Khalid | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using the HPE Nimble Storage array as our secondary (backup) storage array for the corporation. Alongside our backup software, we use the array and software to transfer nightly primary array data to the backup array in a fully hydrated system while utilizing their deduplication to improve storage retention.
  • Performance.
  • Reporting and monitoring.
  • Customer service.
  • Technical support.
  • HPE purchases have impacted Nimble's sales channels.
  • Not as fast as some of the competitors on the market.
  • RMC, HPE's backup software is only compatible with other HPE arrays and not universal.
We Primarily use HPE Nimble for:
  • Primary storage for a SAN environment.
  • Backup storage for a SAN environment.
  • A full HPE network where Infosight can be utilized from the servers to the network level.
  • Secondary replication source.
  • Cloud using Nimble Cloud volumes for Disaster Recovery.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it as our primary T1 storage to host our VM. We have 2 arrays in 2 different locations that replicate to one another for disaster recovery purposes. It's used by the whole organization. Snapshot and replication features along with integration to a lot of 3rd party apps have been very beneficial to our day to day operations.
  • Easy to manage
  • Infosight
  • 3rd party support
  • Not suitable for T2 storage due to price.
Very suitable if you want to use it as primary tier 1 storage, it features easy snapshots and replication between sites, but it is not suitable if you want to use it as low tier slow storage with a lot of read-only due to the cost factor. Each shelf is easily expandable just like most storage arrays too.
January 18, 2019

Nimble Storage

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our Nimble storage array is used as SAN storage for our VMWare infrastructure across the district. It is fast storage and easy to manage.
  • Storage is fast
  • Easy to manage
  • Augments our VMware environment as a SAN datastore
  • For our usage, there are no problems
It is very well suited for VMware infrastructure usage including VDI deployment. We were able to spin up the hybrid storage as a datastore in our VMware environment quickly and easily. There is a plugin available for VMware vCenter to assist with datastore maintenance including resizing, cloning, deleting, and creating snapshots. The management console is easy to use and gives insight into space utilization and monitoring. Software updates are also very simple.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Nimble storage device is our primary source of network based storage. We house all of our virtual servers on this device which includes our test environment as well as our production environment. We noticed an enormous leap in ease of management as well as performance when comparing this device to our previous NetApp storage device.
  • GUI based interface for ease of management
  • No downtime for firmware/software upgrades
  • Integration with other vendors such as Veeam for backups and disaster recovery
  • 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 able to handle a multitude of data repositories very well by applying "performance policies" to their storage volumes. This allows you to fine tune your environment and ensure mission critical repositories always have the appropriate resources attached to them where as your test volumes would get less. Some organizations may not need a separate storage device for their virtual machines and may opt to have their storage they use be built right into their hypervisor. Either way would work but I trust the Nimble equipment to house my data with that being their primary objective.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use our Nimble Storage as our primary production storage solution. We run our ERP and all other domain servers off of it and have excellent performance. We originally purchased it with 1 gig networking on the controllers to enable us to buy in at a cheaper price. We have now upgraded to 10 gig and also upgraded our ISCSI, switching back end to 10 gig as well and have seen a huge boost to throughput and a dive in latency seen by the VMs in Infosight's VM-Vision Logging. Sometimes a 75-80% drop in latency caused predominantly by our networking. It mostly addressed the issues we were having with our old EqualLogic Array with huge latency in the 45-150ms range.The inline de-duplication and compression technologies allowed us to buy small. The fact that the storage came with an A-shelf fully populated and B-shelf empty, we were able to populate that later on and grow the device without growing the footprint.
  • INFOSIGHT!!! It is, in my opinion, the revolution in IT that I have been waiting for. It opens and closes cases for me automatically and even when I have a problem that Support knows about it tells me how to fix it with a patch or something else.
  • Deduplication and Compression Inline. This has saved me legitimately double the space. So I have 13TB of data and only 5.5TB on the SAN.
  • The simplicity of the Interface is key, I don't have time to go digging through a bunch of configurations to get to what I need.
  • Live Support is incredible. By utilizing Infosight for all the small cases they only hire level 3 techs and they know more than just Nimble. On many occasions they have walked me through VMware issues as well so I didn't have to open a case with VMware also.
  • Speed and Performance is just what we needed. I will not say it's the best as in "top dog", but for what we paid I am getting enterprise class speed and performance and 99.9999% up time.
  • They offer free training classes for potential customers, current customers, and VARS all the time.
  • I think the HPE transition has been a little rough and I think things are getting better, but the interface changes they have made are a little strange sometimes.
I think any small to medium business and enterprise would be able to use this storage. I am not used to working in the enterprise space so I cannot say exactly but I think the ROI on this storage is incredible and is worth looking at. I assume in a petabyte or more environment things might get a little tricky, but I think at the last class I was in they mentioned they can handle that as well. I think they are a great fit for most any situation.
Lee Holland, CISSP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Nimble for our high end applications run on VMware. It is used for all virtual machines running all company applications, citrix farms, sql servers, web applications, and file servers. The entire organization uses it. We consider it our mission critical array to deliver availability and performance.
  • Performance. At 30,000+ IOPS our applications run lightning fast
  • Availability. We haven't really run into any major issue. But minor issues automatically create support incidents with Nimble support, and I get call immediately. Very cool!
  • Ease of management. Using pre-set templates and access controls when provisioning volumes makes it very easy to setup new volumes.
  • We haven't really experienced any cons at this time. I'm sure there are, but none that we have observed or been frustrated with.
Nimble does great in virtualized environments. VM's, web apps, sql, exchange, etc. are well suited to run on this platform.
Paul Nicholson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Nimble Storage as our primary storage for our local data center. We have a VMWare environment connected to it and run all types of servers on the storage.
  • Easy administration - - no special training needed.
  • Fast I/O for intense applications such as SQL Servers
  • Great snapshot technology, quick and integrates with VMWare and other software such as VMWare easily
  • Compression and deduplications saves lots of space.
  • It does what we need it to do.
HPE Nimble has worked great for our Windows and SQL Servers. For low usage SQL servers, you may have to pin items into cache so you don't experience slowdowns. If the box is sized correctly, it can handle most loads. It does not do great on data warehouse scenarios where large datasets get recreated daily.
Josh Rice, MBA, ACSP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using HPE Nimble Storage for all of our production VMs. The VM infrastructures touch the whole organization and we are very happy with the decision we made to go down this road. We were looking for improved performance for our VMs and with the Flash storage Nimble offered we are enjoying quick and responsive experiences.
  • Nimble scales well which is a beneficial for an organization that grows quickly.
  • Nimble is quick and responsive as well. Flash storage performs more efficiently than standard spinning disks.
  • The administrative portal is intuitive and easy to use.
  • Even though the admin portal is intuitive, I'd like to seem a better UI experience.
  • Flash storage is more expensive than traditional storage, but we are seeing the prices start to decline.
Nimble is ideal for a production VM environment. The performance boosts you will gain from using Flash storage is noticeable at nearly every level. However, I would not advise using Nimble for DR as the cost is hefty for storage that you will likely not need to utilize often. Whether you are a large business or a small business, Nimble can scale to fit your needs.
Jerry Balch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our entire storage infrastructure is on Nimble arrays. We have multiple at our HQ as well as remote arrays that we replicate to at our branch offices. If the data is not on the cloud (40% of our data) then it resides on Nimble.
  • Simple to use interface! Anyone can use it to create volumes, snapshots, and clones and anyone can restore or clone a snapshot to recover data if needed.
  • Replication is fast and pretty lean for storage replication. It was also easy to setup.
  • Snapshots are small and easy to schedule and restore from.
  • Updates for us are run in the middle of the day and don't affect production at ALL. That's hard to beat!
  • Can't really think of any. We used to use another vendor along with Nimble and ended up dropping them for exclusive Nimble because of how well they do things.
  • Their support is so on top of things that they can "nag" a little to make sure things are fixed and running as best they can.
Well suited for production storage, disaster recovery, and replication. It might not be best if you need the absolute fastest on the market but it's pretty dang fast.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our HPE Nimble SAN is the core storage backend for our virtualization infrastructure. This allows us to leverage VMware cluster capabilities for high availability. We have utilized Nimble for the last 4 years and it is our only storage solution for the entire organization. It provides a self tuning "set it and forget it" storage for our growing enterprise.
  • Nimble provides top notch predictive flash caching that "just works". We typically see 95% + cache hits daily.
  • World class support... You typically don't' call Nimble support when there are problems, they call you.
  • The Nimble hybrid array is a cost effective solution with no compromises.
  • Infosight, the cloud management dashboard, is easy to use and provides quick access to useful information.
  • Our Nimble has had 100% uptime, 4 years and counting.
  • We haven't experienced any cons in 4 years. It's divine.
Nimble has simplified storage for organizations of any size. If you're a small to medium organization that has enterprise storage requirements, Nimble can help you meet that need without having to have a storage engineer on staff. Nimble also has larger arrays that scale to provide solutions for large environments, while also reducing costs compared to other storage vendors.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using HPE Nimble Storage arrays in our VMware environment hosting all our VM Servers. The entire organization has access to the server farm as end users and I manage Nimble and the associated devices. We have 2 HPE Nimble Storage with replication configured.
  • Ease of use and price. Its competitively priced and has great expansion options based on the base model.
  • Deduplication Feature gives really good compression of data, Snapshot is really easy and restores as well. World class customer experience.
  • I like how Nimble uses flash storage. The virtual machines I have residing on our Nimble preform disk writes cleanly and quickly.
  • Lack of an active active configuration, if they would change this it would change our us of them.
  • The company at the time was nimble alone and was a little rocky to deal with.
HPE Nimble Storage provided the best performance per dollar. We were able to decommission our legacy NetApp system which resulted in higher performance, reduced size in our rack, and lower costs than replacing with a competitive NetApp product. Other vendors were considered though none could match the overall value of the Nimble solution. ”
Bear Golightly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently servicing our entire VMware workload using Nimble Storage, including production systems as well as development and testing. The Nimble solution replaced a scale computing storage cluster we had for 5 years, and the difference is night and day. Everything in our environment is now instant, automatic, and reliable.
  • The InfoSight Predictive Analytics portal is a phenomenal value-add for the Nimble platform, especially the VMvision component, which gives incredible visibility into the entire virtualization stack.
  • The storage itself (we are using all-flash) is blistering fast; all storage operations, from regular I/O to volume provisioning, complete instantly.
  • Nimble's proactive support is second to none - During deployment, I took down the array to move it from our workbench to the rack, and within minutes Nimble called me to ask if we know our array is down.
  • Nimble's support engineers are top-notch: When you call Nimble, you're talking to a tier-3 engineer. No lengthy phone trees, no call dispatching and waiting for a callback.
  • Nimble recently got purchased by HP Enterprise, and I've NEVER heard anyone excited about their vendor being acquired by HP.
  • The clever little experimental features added to the "Lab" section of InfoSight don't get added to the main product quickly enough!
  • The awesome green "bling" LEDs on the front only come in green - ideally, I'd like them to be blue, or even purple.
Do you like fast, reliable storage and work for a company that likes to invest in performance? Nimble is for you. Is your organization miserly with storage spending? Nimble is not for you.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nimble Storage to support our main data center VMWare environment. This main data center contains Exchange, Sharepoint and our ERP systems, as well some various other tier 2 applications and test environments. The majority of our user base uses these applications on a daily basis. We bought this Nimble unit to replace a EMC unit mostly due to differences in cost.
  • Great support, some of the best I've dealt with in my 9 years in IT.
  • De-duplication and compression features. These have allowed us to run test environments of our tier 1 applications at almost no drive cost. Our data center is around 7TB but the utilization on the nimble is about 3.5TB.
  • Ease of use. Web GUI is straightforward and easy to navigate.
  • Faster Web GUI performance. Can be a little sluggish at times, even though it is easy to use it may take some time to load certain forms or items.
  • Large physical footprint. This is a 3U unit that has 8TB usable, would be nice to have a smaller rack footprint.
  • Quick access to see which data is currently on the flash storage. The Nimble unit we use is a hybrid HDD and flash array which moves the data around when it is being utilized the most. I am not aware of a way to see this information on the fly.
Nimble Storage is well suited to small/mid sized environments who are budget conscious. We asked another vendor for a similar unit and it was over 100K, while this Nimble unit was less than 50K. It allowed us to provide a high amount of iOPs without breaking the bank to a good amount of applications in our VMWare cluster.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nimble Storage is our primary SAN device for hosting Windows servers and a few management Linux machines. We use VMWare hosts with Nimble. We use Nimble to host internal AD servers, websites and storage servers. The entire organization has access to the server farm as end users. I manage Nimble and the associated devices.
  • Really good management interface, can monitor pace and performance easily.
  • Nimble Infosight software helps plan future needs.
  • Nimble heartbeat monitoring helps me know that Nimble support backs me up as to status of a unit. As a one man shop, it's hard to be on top of everything.
  • The web interface can be sluggish at times, but this is pretty typical of most of my internal use interfaces.
  • I would like to drill down on the snapshots but they take volumes. We wouldn't want to restore a volume typically, we would want to restore an individual server, but the Nimble setup was not done by me and setup could have been better.
  • During setup, our Nimble install was checked by the local rep and he tore down the setup and caused a lot of extra work on the team; his skill level was very basic compared to my contracted install help
We use our Nimble for a Windows Server farm of web and database servers. We also have some P2V legacy servers where the hardware is obsolescent, but we still can use the OS and legacy software as we migrate into new versions of the software.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nimble Storage for all of our data storage needs. We have 155 virtual servers running off of our array. We have Cisco UCS blades running our hosts that connect to Nimble Storage. Our Nimble has 2 10GB network ports that we have aggregated on each controller. We are getting 20GBs network throughput. On average we are using about 3,000 IOPS, but our system can handle around 21,000 IOPS according to our tests. Our SQL servers all run on Nimble Storage. They are fast.
  • Storage Compression - Get more space for your money. We are saving about 4TB right out now using 20TB of space.
  • Caching - Built in SSD caching works well. 75% of our data is hitting cache. It would be more, but our application code limits that.
  • Latency - Latency is very low. Reads and Writes are always below 1ms.
  • Usage Reporting - Great web portal to see how much space you are taking up and your expected growth pattern.
  • Easy Setup - Easy to set up new volumes and expand volumes.
  • Infosight (Web interface) has some neat free features. With VMware and maybe Hyper V you can see your performance on your VMs from the interface. You can see IO, latency, times, etc., that is useful for troubleshooting and performance planning.
  • Rack Space - One of the main reasons we went with Nimble Storage was for rack space. We had 12U of space being taken up by HP Storage. With only 4U we could double and triple our storage space and save 8U for other things. This prevented us from adding another rack at our data center. Which isn't cheap. It saved us around $1200 a month.
  • Power Button - The power button is easily accessed on the front chassis. This button should be covered, or concave to push, not sticking out.
  • Web interface (InfoSight) could have more real-time information. Currently it is a few hours to last 24 hours of data.
  • Weekly reports - Would be nice to see weekly reports and trends emailed.
Nimble Storage works well for storage of anything. It is fast and reliable. Nimble storage is great for virtual machines, SQL databases, exchange, backups, and anything else you would put on a SAN. Nimble is especially good at compression and consolidation. If you have a rack now with 24U of storage, you can most likely knock that down to 4U with Nimble. You get more space for your money on both storage and rack space.
Anthony Nguyen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using the Nimble Storage Array in our current VDI Environment. Last year when we decided to upgrade our old infrastructure with newer equipment, the question of storage came up and we needed to find a device that could handle our workload plus be easy to scale and have manageability. Our search took us to Nimble, which was already a leader in storage using adaptive flash arrays. Their patented CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout) was extremely impressive in I/O reduction and performance. The enhanced quickness could be seen immediately on our SQL servers, resulting in faster VDI times and related services. Nimble also has tie-in compatibility with other big named technology such as Cisco (SmartStack Integration) and VMware SRM (SAN Replication). This allowed it to easily be used with our Cisco USC and with our Disaster Recovery Site where we used VMware's Site Recovery Manager. It should also be noted that the Nimble team was extremely helpful during our POC (proof of concept), implementation, and post implementation. They provided knowledge, insight, and training to our group and were always ready to help, if we needed assistance.
  • CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout) - basically the backbone of their OS that allows them to be so efficient in speed.
  • Management Portal - Insight offers storage management and predictive analytics (prescriptive guidance).
  • Support - Excellent support model. All representative were very knowledgeable and could assist or expedite to someone who could.
  • Price - the Nimble Solution is on the high end of the storage market.
  • Hybrid Flash solution - part SSD, part HDD. There is rumor that an all Flash Array is coming soon - Q3?
  • Education - not much in formal training is available for this product. There is a class given by Nimble but is not thorough enough to teach someone to be certified in using Nimble.
If using a virtualized environment, especially with virtualized SQL, Nimble Storage with all it's features would be highly recommended.
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