We evaluated the Nimble all-flash array as a competitor of the HPE 3PAR. During the evaluation, not only did the unit under-perform to the 3PAR, but Nimble was also acquired by HPE. We feel Nimble is a great product, but the 3PAR 8200 is a better fit in relation to our …
We still use NetApp storage enclosures at each plant for our routine file shares (CIFS) but I would love to swap them out for the HPE 3PARs as we use for our ERP app data. The 3PARS are simply faster and much better at near-instant replication. But even more importantly we can …
By comparison, I would pick DataCore because it's far more flexible to work with and I think less costly. We only went with HP because we didn't know about DataCore and because other persons where we work wanted the HP name.
We also considered NetApp All-Flash FAS since it works on similar technology and provides comparable throughput. However, we were offered better deal from HPE as we are existing customers for HPE, hence we chose HPE 3PAR StoreServ.
NetApp does not have RDMA capabilities in CIFS (SMB) and NFS protocols. Also, NetApp All Flash FAS has no direct storage attachment available. Most configurations require additional switches for data access.
The 3PAR is faster, easier to use, takes up less space and is much easier to expand than a VMAX system. We compared the 3PAR head to head against XtremIO and Compellent and chose the 3PAR for its combination of performance, features and price (Compellent was cheaper, but did …
EMC and Dells products were long in the tooth and kind of outdated.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 …
The 3PAR flash storage is perfect for use cases that need high I/O and low latency (like data bases or even VDI). The flexibility of the system allows you quickly to allocate or expand storage. I would not recommend it for use in archival storage (too expensive) or for systems that have very low I/O requirements.
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.
Replication - HPE 3PAR offers exceptionally fast and well-managed replication with little latency and that's why we bought it to store and protect our most important ERP data. We wanted identical performance and connectivity for our primary storage and our failover (DR) storage and so we bought two of them.
Hybrid storage is right up HPE's alley. You can assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure, for instance, you can store your data that needs super high availability and fast IOPS on an all-flash volume but on the same shelf you can have a platter array for longer-term and less- time-critical data. This saves a lot of money on the front end because you don't have to buy all-flash. Why go all-flash for that data where you aren't going to need it?
3PARs can do both file-level and block-level replication which is nice.
The data compression/compaction is really very good.
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.
No SNMP Support: You can monitor almost every device nowadays with SNMP, but 3PAR does not support it. You have to buy HP Openview, which costs extra and does not integrate well with your already existing monitoring solution.
No NFS Support: HP provides an ugly workaround by deploying a VM onto 3PAR that then provides the assigned storage as NFS storage.
Only expensive SSDs can be run.
Upgrading the storage with new firmware is a horrible process. They assist you with a support center based in India. Just picking an appointment is a hassle. They send you PDFs that look like they have been created by children, with red circles and yellow highlights. You have to go through the whole update routing every time. Even if you already did the routing last time and are now only upgrading a minor release.
Outdated management application: The application looks like it was developed 20 years ago. It is very unintuitive. They announced that you can manage 3PAR over the web, but it is all again just an ugly workaround. You have to install an application that runs on a web server locally, so you cannot access the management via web from everywhere. The web overview looks nice and is intuitive, but it does not provide all the features. You still have to go to the old application for lots of things.
The compaction value is just marketing. If you deploy a disk of 100GB and only have data of about 10GB, 3PAR calculates the unused 90GB into the compaction value. This is just for show and does not provide any "space savings." Dedup is where the real savings come in. Depending on the type of data, we have a dedup ration between 1.3:1 and 4.4:1 on our VVols.
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 are very satisfied with 3PAR performance and especially the IOPS (Input Output Per Second) is pretty amazing. It is easy to configure and doesn't require much knowledge of storage for Tier 1 support team.
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.
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.
We also considered NetApp All-Flash FAS since it works on similar technology and provides comparable throughput. However, we were offered better deal from HPE as we are existing customers for HPE, hence we chose HPE 3PAR StoreServ.
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
HPE 3 PAR has quickly proved its value to our organization. I cannot speak to ROI, but feel that it has quickly met the expectations of our organization.
The 3PAR has allowed our organization to expand business due to its ability to be expanded with no downtime.
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.
