HPE Nimble Storage

Previously, we were using Dell EqualLogic SAN but that was too slow as compared to HPE Nimble storage. It's more cost effective than the others available in the market and it has more security layers as compared to Dell EqualLogic SAN.

A strong user community Improves performance saves time and helps us to focus on other critical components.

As far as performance, they are all very similar now regarding IOPS but Nimble is a nice and easy product. Only thing it lacks is the multiprotocol. Upgrades are easy to deploy.

The Main reason for choosing HPE Nimble Hybrid storage is the Cost. However, even though its not ALL Flash Storage it was still providing the high performance, Latency less than 2 ms, good compression and de-duplication, zeop downtime on software upgrade, good reporting through infosight etc. with all these pros, it didn't make sense to invest on a ALL flash storage thats costs 3 time higher than nimble.

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.

EMC - VNX E3500
The VNX management portal is not as simple to use. The support life-cycle of the VNX is also not as long. The features you get from Nimble are much better without having to pay for extra licenses.

We had some legacy EqualLogic that needed lots of care and feeding and performed on a so so rating. The Tintri appeared to perform well, it had some cutting edge things in the management of virtual machine data stores and siloing them out (pre-release of VVOLs). The price difference wasn't worth it and with the release of VVols, those features were brought into the Nimble storage.

The main selling point for Nimble was the high availability and read/write speeds, and how well it integrates with our virtual infrastructure. The support was also by far one of the best we have experienced across any of our vendors, with any queries we have had being resolved very quickly and efficiently each time.

Starwind is much less expensive and is more of a virtual "provide your own hardware" San so its performance will really depend on how much extra money you put into building the back end. With that said the amount of work it takes to get Starwind working correctly and building the hardware side really makes Nimble seem like a better value in the end. And since Nimble is an all in one solution you do not have to worry about the vendor blaming any other hardware you brought into the mix. We selected Nimble because of the ease of management and lack of need to build the back end.

HPE Nimble compares well from a performance and storage perspective. It is easy to manage and maintain and there is adequate support with a 4hr Same Business Day response for parts. The unit is a little larger than AFA from competitors however it fits well in a 4U rack. Pure still has the upper hand when it comes to performance and overall customer service.

Both are great products. Both integrate well with VMware

When going with Nimble, I compared it against Nutanix (hypervisor/storage all in one), NetApp, and HPE Simplivity (hypervisor/storage all in one). Immediately I was drawn to the Nutanix and HPE Simplivity systems due to their performance capabilities of having everything within the same backplane. However, they were cost prohibitive for our needs. It then came down to the NetApp and Nimble options. The device being replaced was a NetApp so we were already familiar with them. When it came down to it though, the NetApp replacement was more costly, less intuitive and I was unimpressed with managing one for the previous 5 years. I was ready for a change and couldn't be happier with the end result.

The expense and general cockiness of Pure Storage is what pushed me to Nimble. The guys at Nimble were laid back and had invited me to a bunch of events and I got to learn in a non-pushy environment about the technology that makes their devices tick. They were also there to show how much people liked them not their prowess and first to all Flash array like Pure Storage.

I've used Dell Equallogic, Infortrend, Drobo, and Qnap. These products just aren't in the same league with exception to maybe Equallogic. Equallogic is enterprise grade and very good, but frankly still doesn't even compare to Nimble.

Nimble beat Dell and EMC in our bench test in every category including 5 year ROI.

Nimble is much quicker and more efficient than the MSA solution, however we did roll out the MSA solution for DR purposes. Running them side-by-side you can see a significant variance between writing speeds between the two products. Because we are a 7 day shop and have high-throughput at some of our branches, the efficiencies of Nimble is what sold us on the product for our production cluster.

Nimble was way easier to set up initially, simpler to present volumes and WAY simpler to set up replication on. We got rid of 2 Tegile arrays that we're only 18 months old due to their poor design and clunky software.

We were early adopters of Nimble. At the time of our SAN deployment, EMC and NetApp didn't have solutions that matched our needs. Nimble presented itself as a next generation storage platform that wasn't bogged down by legacy technologies. They had a turnkey solution for our needs that provided the best of all worlds (price, performance, reliability, and simplicity). EMC and NetApp couldn't touch the Nimble in all of the same categories.

Purchase price was great and actually cheaper than most competitors but yet I felt like the product was better put together and further along than most of the others.

All of the storage vendors we tested in a shoot-out performed pretty well, though I don't have the raw numbers. What sold us on Nimble is the service and support, which the others cannot touch.

We currently use EMC VNX in our environment and it works well, but after using Nimble we would probably continue that route. The bang for the buck is better with Nimble, and it is just as easy if not easier to use than EMCs product. Also, Nimble support has been some of the greatest support I've encountered from a technical aspect.

Hands down Nimble has been better able to handle the workloads and needs of IT and business growth vs. the NAS solutions I have used. I must also say, our NAS solutions have been primarily for storage and not server situations. The flexibility of Nimble paired with VMWare and Unitrends in our environment has allowed IT to maintain an environment that tripled in size without any additional staff.

Comparing Nimble Storage to the top three players EMC, NETAPP, and HP was hard to do. Everyone had their own special perks. Those companies have been around a lot longer. Three years ago when we made our purchase with Nimble, the company was only 3 years old. We were skeptical about the future. As we learned more about Nimble Storage we found out the creator/owner moved from NetApp. He developed code and a new way of thinking for SAN infrastructure to use compression. We found it useful that the company wasn't fresh out of the water, but enhancing. When it came down to price it stacks up about the same as the top three players. You do get more storage for your money. You get compression which can save 5%-20% depending on the data you have. It works great and doesn't have any kind of performance impact. You also get a smaller foot print. I know to get some of the performance and features from HP you have to have two or three arrays. That is at least 12U. One Nimble array is 4U.

We looked at multiple vendors when searching for storage. Nimble came up ahead on most of the benchmark testing and was within our price spectrum.