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.
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Pricing
Dell VMAX
HPE Nimble Storage
Editions & Modules
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Pricing Offerings
Dell VMAX
HPE Nimble Storage
Free Trial
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Free/Freemium Version
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Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
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Community Pulse
Dell VMAX
HPE Nimble Storage
Features
Dell VMAX
HPE Nimble Storage
Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
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.
