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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 …
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Popular Features

View all 6 features
  • 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

YouTube

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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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
December 24, 2019

Great product

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Omar Khalid | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Lee Holland, CISSP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Paul Nicholson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Josh Rice, MBA, ACSP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Jerry Balch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Bear Golightly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Anthony Nguyen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
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