Overall Satisfaction with Nimble Storage
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.
- Our Nimble array has experienced a total of one incident, which had zero impact on the business, since installation.
- Our previous solution had at least one incident a month, each of which brought production to its knees for a while, costing us thousands (or tens of thousands) per incident.
- We have now automated many of our storage operations, eliminating both human work and human error from ongoing operational and development work.
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.