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.
Easy interface and the accessibility of the features are effective and this solution functionalities on data migration and processing of different from other packages is amazing. NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays is the most secure platform for easy management of all the business and project data and the capacity planning tools and even the configuration options are the best and easy to use.
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.
As always, Netapp upgrades are really painful. I wish there was an easy way of upgrading Netapp.
GUI is hard to use and CLI is even worse. GUI is confusing and you click all over the place before you get over the learning curve. CLI has changed from the 7-mode days and is very confusing to use. I have had scenarios where the support themselves use documentation to put in the proper commands.
Like any array, Netapp's CDOT has it's own bugs in the software. We learnt the hard way when one of our nodes went down and a bug prevented take over of SCSI services which resulted in an APD situation on all our ESXI hosts. Was a nightmare rebooting all the VM's and ESXI's to relieve them of the APD's. People don't pay millions towards a storage platform to go through nightmares.
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.
Our organizations primary storage platform is NetApp AFF-A900 nodes. All our storage requirements, be it storage visible to our compute either using FC or NFS is through these nodes. The shares or CIFS too are setup on these nodes. We also use the fabric pool to write the data to NetApps Storage Grid
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 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
The IBM All Flash FAS was similar in performance and price, but we were already a NetApp shop. This made the decision easier to go with the NetApp AFF system so it would tie in with our SnapManager architecture, as well as keep the learning curve short.
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.
Epic, our EMR providor, has very aggressive guidelines for performance. The Netapp AFF meets those guidlines easily eben in a mixed workload environment. This has helped us meet our business objectives by not having to diversify our storage platforms or vendors.
Multi-protocol support (block (ISCSI/FiberChannel) or File (NFS/CIFS)) Allows us to use the Netapp systems to solve all storage requirements regardless of the system needing storage
Clustered technologies along with non-disruptive movement of data between nodes on the cluster make hardware refreshes simple and allows the business to keep running without interruption even during massive data moves.
