HPE Nimble Storage vs. HPE StoreOnce

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.

Incentivized

Vm backups are the fastest I've ever had with this unit for any backup software system. Agent backups are the fastest ever to this device too. Veeam supported HPE StoreOnce for file backups way back. However, we discovered you cannot do this for large network drive scenarios. So, we have to have a separate backup system for file based share backups. it would be great to resolve this at some point in the future. Also, replication of a primary SO to a DR SO works amazing now based on the 52x0 series HPE StoreOnce units. The older 5100 series just could not cut it to copy to another backup target fast enough for large data backup consumers.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We really like the deduplication feature of HPE StoreOnce. It helps reduce storage footprint by 1:3 to 1:10 depending on type of files being stored.
• It's easy to manage files on HPE StoreOnce servers using command line options.
• We use Veeam Backup Server software to manage our backups on HPE StoreOnce.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• For fastest performance and best dedupe, ISV software supporting Catalyst required
• VTL capability requires more overhead and space due to aging policies, etc.
• Use of CIFS/SMB for backups is significantly slower than Catalyst.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It just works and the support contract we have is good enough for the company needs

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

My team who are currently administering HPE StoreOnce do not come from a storage background. We still didn't had to struggle much configuring and using HPE StoreOnce. Of course, HPE team was very helpful in smooth technology transition. For critical errors, we already have phone home feature enabled and HPE support team has been excellent and their response time in dealing with technical errors/incidents.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We had couple of incidents so far and HPE support team was very proactive through the process until the incident was closed satisfactorily.

Incentivized

It was pretty smooth, at least smother that a Dell EMC Unity we set it up last week

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

NetApp is a great product and very well established in market. But HPE StoreOnce features like scalability using disk based duplication that lowers the backup footprint. It is very well coupled with HPE Recovery Manager Central provides backup protection and backup efficiency. We were also offered a nice discount while choosing HPE StoreOnce.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• HPE StoreOnce doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge for day to day administration and management. This helps reducing IT support staff cost.
• It provides an amazing compaction ratio and saves you a lot on the storage side.

Incentivized