Nimble Storage

[XZim]

I'm thinking of investing in Nimble Storage to replace our current FC SAN infrastructure. It is does some pretty clever stuff with SSD and snapshots for backup ...however they are a relatively new player in the storage game with a small (but growing)client base.

Anyone using Nimble already and what has your experience been particularly with running VSphere on this SAN?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Nimble's involvement in asking some customers to post on this thread has been disclosed.  No need to deal with that further.

Dave

User Moderator

[Benjamin_Craig]

@Slingsh0t

Wow, thanks for alleging we're all a bunch of paid shills.  My Nimble rep saw this post and reached out to his customers to ask if they would comment - no offer of incentive, no discounts - seemed like a fair request to me.

Consider this my confirmation that I don't work for Nimble, am not wearing any attire with a Nimble logo, am not a VAR, or am biased against the other storage vendors out there.  I put a lot of effort into what I thought was a pretty fair review of their product because they saved me 8 FREAKING TERABYTES of space, 17 times less than what my Equallogic members were using, and my backup jobs/throughput increased in performance by 500%.  Frankly, I thought my review was pretty reserved because it didn't include <blink> tags and 48-point hot-pink bold fonts.  As I said in my conclusion, anyone is free to contact me if they would like to discuss it further.  And I too have screenshots to prove it.

[Slingsh0t]

Wow no need to be so overly-dramatic guys! :smileysilly:  The old adage comes to mind: "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is!".  I saw a post on an emerging vendor/product with many positive reviews from zero/low posters and nary a negative comment in sight and naturally became suspicious...  

Anyways back on topic!  Has anyone done any IOPS testing in their specific environment and is able to post some stats?  Details of the test like %rand%read, block sizing, datastore path selections, number of san uplinks on their hosts etc?

[jwhoakley]

In my experience, there has been no such thing as a perfect piece of software or hardware.  Hence, I am also naturally sceptical.  A lot of the above chit chat reads to me like the initial experience has been good.  However, I would recommend always run a trial the hardware (or software) before believing any of the hype - which is on the cards for us.

And finally, @Benjamin Craig - Fella, I don't think you should feel offended when others are exercising caution and feel sceptical - it is only a matter of opinion.  Just be happy that you are blessed with perfect storage for your environment.

[bawojcik]

"If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is!".

I remember people from a three letter SAN company saying that about boot from SAN back in the early Xiotech days...

:smileycool:

"nary a negative comment"

I did write: "Compellent GUI was more full featured than Nimble's"

"IOPS testing in their specific environment and is able to post some stats"

I posted what limited testing I have done - if there is something you want to see tested - PM me and maybe we could do a webex.

I figure if you are interested enough - you will be willing to spend the time too.

Unless you are too busy building bat files for DOS 3.3 because you think this GUI thing is a fad pushed by marketing shills

[bawojcik]

"In my experience, there has been no such thing as a perfect piece of software or hardware."

Correct - but every year improvements are made - so it makes sense to keep looking at new tech. I'm not using my Nokia anymore...

"However, I would recommend always run a trial the hardware (or software) before believing any of the hype - which is on the cards for us."

Good advice - and the better vendors and resellers will make sure that you are able to do that if you are a serious customer

[sakman9999]

We replaced our EMC CLARiION CX300 with a Nimble CS220 and have seen considerable performance improvement.  Specifically, our Exchange backup times has decreased by nearly 40%, VM boot times have decreased by about 50%, and various database and file operations show speed improvements in the 40% to 60% range.  The CS220 supports a two-host VSphere 5 cluster as well as a physicall Exchange 2007 server.

In an IOmeter test of the CS220 (with a light production load) versus the CX300 (with no production load and reconfigured as a 14-disk RAID0), the Nimble outperformed the CX300 by a factor of 7 to 10 in IOPS, latency, and Mbps.

We are generally very pleased with our decision to go off of the conventional path (we had considered Hitachi and Dell as well) and look forward to seeing the Nimble product mature and grow with us.

[Turas]

Slingsh0t wrote:

Wow no need to be so overly-dramatic guys! :smileysilly:  The old adage comes to mind: "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is!".  I saw a post on an emerging vendor/product with many positive reviews from zero/low posters and nary a negative comment in sight and naturally became suspicious...  

Anyways back on topic!  Has anyone done any IOPS testing in their specific environment and is able to post some stats?  Details of the test like %rand%read, block sizing, datastore path selections, number of san uplinks on their hosts etc?

I had this exact same feeling and reservations.  When I initially did my research there was not much out there that I could find about them.  I did find some posts on Spiceworks about them and it was all positive which made me nervous.  As it has been said, there is not one single perfect product out there for all needs.  I was just waiting for some negatives.  In the end we decided that is was worth it to take a chance and I am glad we did.  We got an evaluation unit in (CS-260G) and hammered away at it.  It passed with flying colors and we are now a happy Nimble customer.  No the product is not perfect but it works flawlessly so far and gets better with each firmware upgrade.

A little background:

We are a Cisco UCS shop running vSphere 5 (about 2 months into the upgrade) with four hosts and around 30VM's.  We had switched from a HP FC MSA SAN to an EQL at the end of 2010.  At that time we purchased one PS6010E (SATA unit) EQL knowing we would need another higher performing one the following year but needed space now.  Coming from the old SAN this was amazing.  The simplicity and tools it came with were great.  We loved how much better it was than the HP MSA as I could actually see performace counters and track it over time.  There was a lot more visibilty into the system.  We were not using the EQL snapshots at the time and were using a separate backup process.  We left the default allocation of snap reserve place in case we decided to use it.  This definately had an impact on how much space we were able to use. 

By the end of 2011 it was almost full with much of the space wasted on not used snapshots reserves.  We also had some perfomance issues although we expected this.  We started to look at that new unit and realized the pricing was just so high.  We knew this going in but there was some buyers remorse settting in.  Had we gone with the EMC unit we looked at we would be adding just a new shelf for a much smaller price tag.  We decided to check out all options just to make sure we should still stay the course.  At this point I had not even heard of Nimble and I just happened to get a call from a vendor of mine saying they saw the demo and I should at least take a look at it.

This started the research phase of the project and I ran into lack of information especially the negative.  After many calls, site visits and emails we started to move forward with our unit.  Nimble sent a sales engineer down to assist with the evaluation but the product was really so simple to setup I felt at first like it was a waste to have him.  In the end it was nice having him there to assist as I was able to ask questions and get answers right then and there.  If there was something he did not know we compiled the list and then called into the support line and got a real person who was able to assist.  Support was great and at one point we got to talk with some guys in the development area which answered some of the more technical questions and answered some roadmap items I had.  I did see some shortcomings in the information available in the UI compared to our current EQL SAN.  In talking with them it turns out they had heard some of the same already.  Some of these items were already on the roadmap to be addressed whereas some others they had talked about but nothing had been decided.  Having that kind of interaction with the company is not something you would get at the bigger providers.  I know as they get bigger some of this is likely to change but have loved the interaction and follow up even post sale.  In the end I was able to meet both my performance and storage needs with a single unit where as I initially thought it would take two.  This has allowed me to send my EQL to my DR site and I will be replicating to that via Veeam.  It would be nice if I had two of the Nimble units to take advantage of their replication, but for now that is not in the cards. 

I found this thread as I do follow many storage threads on both EQL and Nimble on many sites.  There was no contact from anyone about it. 

[lobo519]

we actually had a demo of a Nimble array in our office for a few weeks. Impressive in the IOP department! I didn't care for the hardware though. Hardware was consumer grade and I felt that it was quite over priced.  We did quite a bit of component testing and it mostly worked as expected. The support was very responsive as well. The software is simple but efficent.

Cons:

-RAID 6 -  rebuild slow - no other options.

- double drive failure shuts the arry down.

- Somtimes after pulling components the array didn't respond well when the component was replaced.

-Their scalability options were not available at the time - this was a huge consideration! ( not sure that they are now either ).

- Next business day support -  I prefer my 4 hour response from Dell (1.5 hours where I live)

We ended up with Equallogic - It ended up being mostly a business decision.

I do think that Nimble has a good product but they are just too new for us.

[DavidKlee]

We demoed a Nimble array on 10GbE in our office about six months ago and came out generally impressed. The array was simple but straightforward and performed well during normal tests. We specialize in high performance databases on VMware, and in this aspect it performed poorly. The RAID-6 configuration annoyed us, and very high I/O testing suffered as a result. Overall, I think the Nimble SAN is a good device for small to mid-sized workloads, but for top tier items it falls short on performance and scalability features.

[WSSadmin]

I can vouch for David's experience, his company and him specifically has helped our company with database performance tuning and SAN I/O.

We have recently installed a Nimble CS220 to replace our EqualLogic PS5000e.  I have high hopes for the SAN, however we have had some fairly significant trouble getting it setup and it's still not working properly.  Now this could be a VMware issue, it could be a network issue or it could be the Nimble.

Basically we have 4 hosts running ESXi5 and vCenter 5.

2 physical vmnics per host, 1 nic going into a stand alone 24pt Dell PowerConnect 6224 and 1 nic going into a separate 24pt Dell PowerConnect 6224.

We're using Jumbo frames.

We have 4 Eth ports on the Nimble to per controller for iSCSI traffic.  Eth 3 and Eth 5 are on the first iSCSI nic.  Eth 4 and 6 are on the second switch. Same configuration on the 2nd standby controller.

For some reason we are not seeing all 4 paths to each volume, or it seems to be hit and miss.  We've had at random times all paths be seen on 1 host and none on another.  As of right now we're seeing on our first 2 hosts and our 4th host 2 of the 4 paths.  Currently on the 3rd host we see 3 of 4 paths.

I've been working with Nimble support along with VMware support for over 10 hours now and we're really not any further than what we were before.

I have faith, but considering my EqualLogic connected without me knowing the first thing about VMware or iSCSI when I implemented it, this is kind of bad.

[WSSadmin]

To update my post above.  We came to the conclusion that it was a networking problem.  The switches weren't talking to each other and it was recommended that the switches be stacked.  Plugging everything into a single switch until my stacking modules come in made the Nimble CS220 work perfectly.  I've done some brief tests on it using one of the IOMeter configs on the VMware community forum and it just blows our EqualLogic out of the water in terms of IOPs, sometimes as much as 10x.

The support of Nimble thorughout the setup was pretty phenominal as well.  Had a firedrill as well to cause a controller fail over and was called thanks to the monitoring.

[DavidKlee]

That's fantastic that everything works great there! I'm glad that you figured out it was the networking. Networking configs and iSCSI problems are always tough to work through.The SSDs in the Nimble definitely make a difference for routine operations. The max throughput on VMware is a direct result from the 1GbE adapters. Equallogic works some magic with their load balancing in their MPIO drivers. Nimble would definitely benefit from a 10GbE setup (wink wink say no more).

[berndmaier]

hi,

could anybody say something to the pricing of nimble-storage...

im looking for a 20-25TB Storage (Nimble CS240G or CS260G)

best regards

[JayL12]

I remember their listing price for 260G is around 120K and for 240G is around 100K. Not sure about the real world price though.

For those of you using Nimble storage, because it only keeps snapshots for up to 90 days, what is your solution to keep your backup data for longer than 90 days?

[bawojcik]

"only keeps snapshots for 90 days"

Hmm - unless I am thinking of something else that is news to me - I put my system in last thanksgiving and I have snapshots all the way back to December...

[XZim]

I think it is best to contact Nimble themselves for a more accurate (discounted) quotation.

On the subject of snapshots  - there is no 90 day limit.

[JayL12]

Thanks, that's interesting to know. I found the 90 day limit in the datasheet on Nimble's website. See the attached pic.

[bawojcik]

This is from Nimble support - I sent them an email

"There is no time based limit. We use the 90 day number in the datasheet as an illustration as snapshots do take some storage space so given a particular change-rate and amount of primary storage, you could retain "N" number of days of hourly snapshots - for example."

[dleary]

JayL12:

Apologies for the confusion created by our datasheet that you referenced.  There is NO time limit (90 day or otherwise) on snapshot retention with Nimble Storage.  We say 30-90 days of snapshots as a contrast to what many of our customers previously stored, typically only a few days or maybe weeks because they hit either space or performance constraints going beyond that.  Because our snapshots are very space efficient and have no performance overhead it is cost effective to store thousands of snapshots going back several months, but in fact we have customers keeping snapshots for much longer periods with no problems.  We'll change the wording on the datasheet to make this more clear.

Dan Leary, Nimble Storage