Nimble performance that won't slow down your budget.
March 20, 2017
Nimble performance that won't slow down your budget.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Nimble Storage
We use Nimble Storage to support our main data center VMWare environment. This main data center contains Exchange, Sharepoint and our ERP systems, as well some various other tier 2 applications and test environments. The majority of our user base uses these applications on a daily basis. We bought this Nimble unit to replace a EMC unit mostly due to differences in cost.
- 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.
- We have been able to increase the amount of data we can use without increasing the cost of that data using the de-duplication and compression features. We have been able to utilize 7TB of Virtual Machine data but the footprint is only 3.5TB after de-duplication and compression.
- This unit cost significantly less than the competitors unit we compared it to, under half the cost for similar iOPs.
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.