Dell VMAX All Flash is the latest iteration in the former Symmetrix series of enterprise flash array storage, available in the Dell VMAX 250F edition, or the Dell EMC VMAX 950F edition.
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HPE Nimble Storage
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Nimble Storage was acquired by HPE in 2017. The enterprise flash array product line now goes by the name HPE Nimble Storage.
Information Technology Infrastructure Specialist - Storage Management
Chose Dell VMAX
IBM FlashSystem A9000, IBM FlashSystem 9200, IBM FlashSystem 5100, IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems), IBM System Storage DS8900F (formerly DS8000), IBM SAN48B-5, IBM DS8880F and Pure Storage FlashArray
The EMC array is a lot more robust, but the PURE array does almost the same with about a tenth of ease from the configuration. It really depends on the type of backend servers that you need to support as to whether you need a EMC array or a PURE array.
EMC and Dells products were long in the tooth and kind of outdated. They lacked the reporting and analytics that HPE Nimble provides. Pure is really our gold standard for storage , but even Pure lacks the analytics that HPE is able to achieve. I would love to transfer those …
As far as performance, they are all very similar now regarding IOPS but Nimble is a nice and easy product. Only thing it lacks is the multiprotocol. Upgrades are easy to deploy.
The Main reason for choosing HPE Nimble Hybrid storage is the Cost. However, even though its not ALL Flash Storage it was still providing the high performance, Latency less than 2 ms, good compression and de-duplication, zeop downtime on software upgrade, good reporting through …
We used a Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage array for many years and it worked well. A big issue was that upgrading firmware required system downtime and during one upgrade I was unable to bring the systems back up afterwards. I spent several days on the phone over a holiday …
EMC - VNX E3500 The VNX management portal is not as simple to use. The support life-cycle of the VNX is also not as long. The features you get from Nimble are much better without having to pay for extra licenses.
We had some legacy EqualLogic that needed lots of care and feeding and performed on a so so rating. The Tintri appeared to perform well, it had some cutting edge things in the management of virtual machine data stores and siloing them out (pre-release of VVOLs). The price …
The main selling point for Nimble was the high availability and read/write speeds, and how well it integrates with our virtual infrastructure. The support was also by far one of the best we have experienced across any of our vendors, with any queries we have had being resolved …
Starwind is much less expensive and is more of a virtual "provide your own hardware" San so its performance will really depend on how much extra money you put into building the back end. With that said the amount of work it takes to get Starwind working correctly and building …
HPE Nimble compares well from a performance and storage perspective. It is easy to manage and maintain and there is adequate support with a 4hr Same Business Day response for parts. The unit is a little larger than AFA from competitors however it fits well in a 4U rack. Pure …
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 …
I've used Dell Equallogic, Infortrend, Drobo, and Qnap. These products just aren't in the same league with exception to maybe Equallogic. Equallogic is enterprise grade and very good, but frankly still doesn't even compare to Nimble.
Nimble was way easier to set up initially, simpler to present volumes and WAY simpler to set up replication on. We got rid of 2 Tegile arrays that we're only 18 months old due to their poor design and clunky software.
Nimble is much quicker and more efficient than the MSA solution, however we did roll out the MSA solution for DR purposes. Running them side-by-side you can see a significant variance between writing speeds between the two products. Because we are a 7 day shop and have …
The expense and general cockiness of Pure Storage is what pushed me to Nimble. The guys at Nimble were laid back and had invited me to a bunch of events and I got to learn in a non-pushy environment about the technology that makes their devices tick. They were also there to …
Purchase price was great and actually cheaper than most competitors but yet I felt like the product was better put together and further along than most of the others.
We were early adopters of Nimble. At the time of our SAN deployment, EMC and NetApp didn't have solutions that matched our needs. Nimble presented itself as a next generation storage platform that wasn't bogged down by legacy technologies. They had a turnkey solution for our …
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.
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 …
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 …
Comparing Nimble Storage to the top three players EMC, NETAPP, and HP was hard to do. Everyone had their own special perks. Those companies have been around a lot longer. Three years ago when we made our purchase with Nimble, the company was only 3 years old. We were skeptical …
Dell EMC VMAX All-Flash Storage is a very powerful storage that easily manages huge data transactions with high IO processing speed. This Storage is well suited for critical production environments because response times are much better. This storage enables direct data backup. It's always up and running during updates because it creates a redundant connection from the controller.
HPE Nimble Storage has very impressive deduplication and compression built into their systems. There is really no need to configure anything as it is taking care of automatically at the firmware layer. If you are not planning on utilizing the replication between partners it may very well suite you to find a less expensive option, but this was a feature that we needed.
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.
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.
Nimble is doing its job well and any issues that do come up cause the Nimble support team to alert us before we would potentially see an impact to our production environment. I do wish we could expand into the unused space in the CS210 shelf which is limited by what I assume is a marketing/sales strategy, but we will likely add shelves moving forward.
Almost perfect, some hoops to jump through after major upgrade, but overall simple and effective. Our storage administrator really likes the integration with vmware as it makes his life easier. Also it was no trouble integrating it with our active directory credentials. The only issue we had was getting the plugin in VMWare going initially.
The best part about this array is that once you have it configured it is pretty much done. There is little to no other configurations to be done other than normal volume adjustments. Support is great as they understand this array very well. The updates are very hands-off and are done solely by support. You contact them and then there are no other changes done on the end-user's side.
Any time I have had to contact support, they have always been quick to respond, and very efficient in resolving any issues. When an action has been required on our side for a fix, they have been very helpful in explaining step by step what was required, and when replacement parts have been needed, we've had them within 24 hours.
The EMC array is a lot more robust, but the PURE array does almost the same with about a tenth of ease from the configuration. It really depends on the type of backend servers that you need to support as to whether you need a EMC array or a PURE array.
The Main reason for choosing HPE Nimble Hybrid storage is the Cost. However, even though its not ALL Flash Storage it was still providing the high performance, Latency less than 2 ms, good compression and de-duplication, zeop downtime on software upgrade, good reporting through infosight etc. with all these pros, it didn't make sense to invest on a ALL flash storage thats costs 3 time higher than nimble
Nimble's snapshot capability has saved us several times. It would be hard to estimate the amount of money we would have had to spend, in additional support, without the capability to quickly revert a LUN/VM back to its previous state. Much better than relying on VMware or MS Snapshots.
Having the Nimble has allowed us the capability to build better and faster clusters which in turns as allowed our users to do more work in less time.
Nimble can be expensive to start off with so initially it took a while for our ROI to turn positive.
