Nimble Storage - a great solution for our growth
October 06, 2016
Nimble Storage - a great solution for our growth
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Nimble Storage
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
- From the IT perspective, Nimble has been a great return on investment. We are able to do things we were not able to do before, I can spin up a new server for testing or deployment in a matter of minutes.
- Also for IT, I am able to test Linux and Windows machines and delete them after I am done testing. This has allowed a lot of flexibility for me and saved time and expense of not needing additional hardware.
- The business side has not seen the return on their investment yet, but that is primarily that the management has a different focus and hasn't fully developed a budget for the changes from a physical to virtual environment.
- NAS
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.