HPE Nimble Storage vs. Huawei OceanStor

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

Easy tools for the user to set and flexibility of the functionalities is amazing and Huawei OceanStor can migrate a group of different data from other third parties platforms easily and generation of excellent data analytics through Huawei OceanStor is also easy and profitable. The environment on which the user can manage multiple data through Huawei OceanStor is incredible.

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

• The Huawei OceanStor Dorado All Flash NVMe storage array provides maximum performance.
• The OceanStor Dorado is ideally suited for use with databases, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Virtual Machines, and file server environments.
• The capital and maintenance costs were very competitive for a similar storage system at other storage vendors.

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

• Support desk to be available.
• Implementation to new people is not that easy.
• Setting of the advance features on Huawei OceanStor may not be easy to all users.

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

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

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

When purchasing support for your Huawei OceanStor system, there are two support options offered by Huawei (i.e. Hi-Care and Co-Care). Huawei Hi-Care service is when Huawei responds to your technical requests for remote troubleshooting and advance hardware replacement in the shortest possible time. Hi-Care provides onsite technical support to help you maintain a more efficient and stable network environment and improve network productivity. Whereas, Huawei Co-Care service is a collaborative solution delivered by Huawei certified partners. Depending on the capability of your Huawei support partners, I would recommend Hi-Care for mission-critical environments since this ensures Huawei takes responsibility for meeting the support SLAs. If you have very capable Huawei support partners, then Co-care could be a more cost-effective support option.

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

The Huawei OceanStor product line is very broad and they offer a wide range of storage systems from entry-level for the small enterprise to high-end storage systems for those demanding workloads typically required at medium to large enterprises. Huawei OceanStor is very reliable with many software features at competitive costs when compared to other storage systems. Huawei OceanStor can easily integrate within the data centre as their system supports many operating systems, hypervisors, SAN switches etc. Another important point to note is that Huawei has made it known that they spend a substantial amount of their revenue in R&D and that is confirmed in the reliability of their products.

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

• Cost of ownership is advantageous compared to other products
• Can significantly reduce the cost with compression and deduplication
• Energy consumption is low, as it shows on its own dashboard a monthly average of 301.25 kWh

Incentivized