Nimble Storage - Excellent choice
December 03, 2018

Nimble Storage - Excellent choice

Jeff Koelker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HPE Nimble Storage

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.
  • We've had to spend less time managing the product daily due to its ease of use within the GUI.
  • Upgrades are easier so there is less research to be done ahead of time compared to our last product.
  • Nimble came in quite a bit cheaper than other competitors when we upgraded our storage environment.
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.
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.