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Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

 
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mdenton128110
Occasional Advisor

Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

Hello everyone

We are about to pull the trigger on replacing our Hitachi enterprise storage with Nimble. We no longer need the functionality that Hitachi provided (or the performance) and as a technical group we have identified Nimble as the best fit solution for our infrastructure. Senior management are, quite understandably, nervous about this move. I would love to hear from anyone who is using Nimble for front-line services. The more companies I can quote as using Nimble for mission critical applications or in scenarios where the business would just "stop" if Nimble fell over the easier it will be to make this change.  For some reason there is an impression that people are deploying Nimble tactically and not at the heart of the business. I would also sleep a little better for hearing from others who have put complete faith in this relatively new platform.

Kind regards

Mark

9 REPLIES 9
Not applicable

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

Hey Mark,

  We've been using Nimble for over two years now and we just purchased an additional one to be installed in the next month.  Our Nimble devices are our core storage infrastructure and replaced 4 HP Lefthand SANs we had.  We've been beyond pleased with the Nimble selection and the support has been the best support I've experienced in my almost 25 years of IT.  Often Nimble is calling me about an issue before I realize I even have one.  We use the Nimble solution for back-ending our virtual environment, providing iSCSI connectivity for our remaining physical servers, and as a target for hourly and daily backups for business continuity.  I researched over half a dozen storage competitors before deciding on Nimble for our original purchase.  When it came time to make our latest acquisition, I again did research to see if any competitors could stand up to the challenge, but again Nimble was the right fit for the core of our infrastructure.  You just can't beat the cost effectiveness and scale-ability that they offer in their lineup.  It's just a great foundation to build on for either size or compute.

  Besides... Hitachi makes really good drills, tractors, and electronics, but Nimble only makes really good storage. 

Ted B.

PS:  Reach out to me on email if you'd like to talk.

dhewett37
New Member

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

We are using Nimble arrays for all of our production environments. We have ~800 VMs distributed across multiple arrays, including our highest I/O MySQL databases. The reliability has been the best compared to all of our other arrays--no outages due to Nimble arrays, where we've had outages because of issues with our Dell and HP arrays. The firmware upgrades on the Nimble are transparent and we've not had any issues, even with our primary array hosting our master database servers.

-David

Not applicable

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

We've had our Nimble arrays in place since May of last year and I can honestly say it is the best IT investment we have ever made. We have 2 arrays - one covering our entire production environment, and the 2nd as a replication of the first. We are comfortably running 40 servers on a single array and when I regularly check the performance stats I do sometimes feel like I need to give the array a nudge just to make sure it's awake - it's efficiency is that good!

jzygmunt70
Valued Contributor

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

We've been using Nimble storage for our entire production environment for over a year now with no regrets.  The platform has been rock solid for us.  We have multiple arrays in production, have had over 100 vms on a single array, and we've scaled capacity and done firmware upgrades without disruption.  We're driving ERP, Exchange, Microsoft SQL, and a ton of odds and ends with it.

bbigelow28
New Member

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

We migrated from 2 CX4-120's several years ago and what started out as storage only for our Citrix environment has turned into our main Storage solution. User friendly interface - (If you can install Windows, you can manage a nimble array), cloning & snapshots are easy to create, test and manage and by the way - support is great. We've been a customer for 3 years now and love the equipment. Good Luck
!

aprice119
Valued Contributor

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

Hi Mark.

We're a private, four-year college that uses Nimble for every virtual machine we have: 80ish servers and 50 (today) virtual desktops. We have one CS220G array with the X8 flash pack and a second disk shelf for added, future expansion. Our only remaining physical servers are the production and test environments for our student information system, which uses HP-UX and can't be virtualized into VMware (nor is it appropriate in our environment to use iSCSI/SAN storage on those servers, though it was considered). Our plans, though, are exploring converting both of these systems to Red Hat and putting them onto the single VMware/Nimble platform we own.

Nimble has performed flawlessly for us, and the only issues we've have with our storage were caused by bad configurations further up the chain. It runs without complaint and only take my time to manage when I want to look at the performance charts. Otherwise I never have to log in.

I highly recommend Nimble to anyone I talk to who's in the market for a SAN. With the ever-growing feature set in Nimble OS it just keeps getting better and taking on more and more niche features that other vendors try to push.

I hope your management team agrees soon!

Alan

iannoble38
Advisor

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

HI Mark, I have 20 years experience in IT having used many different systems and work at a 600 user company in the Oil & Gas sector where uptime is critical. I carried out extensive due diligence on the product, support, supply chain and more.

I talked to other customers, suppliers, almost every nimble engineer in the UK, went to events from a few miles away to a few thousand to get more informatiom, read *every* single internet post, from forums to technical documentation, storage field day videos, IPO documents that go into the minute of the company itself, reviewed their leadership program and also researched in detail any competitors claims.

Excessive, but I'm also passionate about tech so there was lots to learn and more so than just the product.

I bought it, and it now runs everything, including core ERP. I couldn't be happier.

I wrote up some of my notes here.

http://www.iannoble.co.uk/nimble-storage-useful-information-when-performing-technical-due-diligence/

mdenton128110
Occasional Advisor
Solution

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

I want to thank everyone above who took the time to reply to this post. It was invaluable evidence supporting our proposal, which has been accepted ! :-)

Nick_Dyer
Honored Contributor

Re: Are you using Nimble for business critical applications ?

Hey Now! Congratulations Mark, welcome to the Nimble family

Nick Dyer
twitter: @nick_dyer_