Nimble in the West Midlands

[nicholab]

Hi any Nimble storage users in the West Midlands that I could come and see?

[nicholab]

Does no one in the west midlands have a nimble array? Any other nimble user who want to talk? Keen to use them for virtualization and vdi.

[nicholab]

Bump! Does any one want to talk Nimble SAN's with me?

[Tallwood_6]

We have a nimble SAN if you have any questions fire away

[nicholab]

How did you get SLT to go with an unknown vendor like Nimble? Are they able to provide as much support as a big company? Is the performance as good as they say? Are you supporting Virtualization and VDI on the same storage box?

 

I can see the storage debate is like with Ruckus a couple of years ago SLT worry it not as good as a big player.

[Tallwood_6]

Its quite simple if you try and spec up a SAN with similar specs and performance from one of the bigger OEMs it comes out a lot more expensive. The rest is all about SLG trusting in your expertise on the matter. We have a single Nimble array supporting are whole virtual environment, we don't use VDI currently but they are well equipped for this.

[pantscat]

I'm a new Nimble user - I can understand your concern about them being relatively unknown, but their market share is growing at a fair pace and even my old NetApp account manager acknowledged this.

 

I wouldn't say it was quite as simple as Tallwood_6 put it - NetApp were able to put together a quote which came very close to the Nimble one in terms of sizing and performance, as did Huawei (if you count them as a 'known' vendor), but the Nimble is a very straightforward beast in terms of administration which is quite appealing.

 

I'd say, so far, I'm very impressed with the Nimble SAN - we're using it with a vSphere 5.5 cluster and the performance is impressive. We should have enough headroom to be able to do a small-ish scale VDI roll-out in the future, too.

[nicholab]

Where did you go to buy your storage solution was it a single supplier for your whole vSphere build? Edited August 26, 2014 by nicholab

[pantscat]

Initially I spoke to Nimble directly about my requirements, and they sent me some info, had a few webinars and I spoke to a few existing customers.

 

The rest of the vSphere build I specced myself - I'm quite a VMware nerd and so it's quite easy to do yourself. In the end I got everything (Nimble SANs, HP servers, switches etc.) all through the same supplier as they were most competitive. Let me know if you need any more info.