Nimble vs. Dell/Complellent vs. TinTri
Last Updated: 5/10/18I have had a Nimble Hybrid (Adaptive Flash) array for 2 years. So I lean toward nimble.
We purchased in 2016. During 2016 I did a big review of: TinTri vs. Nimble vs. Dell/Complellent
I do not regret choosing Nimble.
About previous comments that mention hybrid nimble arrays being limited by spinning disks. Nimble choose spinning disks on purpose and uses them in a way that no one else does. So what you think about the limits of spinning disk may actually be wrong in a nimble world.
In my experience Nimble can ingest huge amounts of data. In fact, writes are often faster than reads. Obviously you have to be sized correctly, because no budget storage system will ever out perform a high end array.
Also, I am at a Nimble event now and I can confidently say that they have just release a new line of All flash and Adaptive Flash (hybrid) arrays.
Here are some decision items that I remember from my 2016 review (so some things may have changed):
* My review information was based on information directly from the sales teams. not from actual experience.
TinTri Pros: tons of performance data and a nice GUI for troubleshooting. very high rating for IOPS.
TinTri Cons: No cloud storage of stats, no shelves to expand, must buy more arrays to grow.
Complellent Pros: nice tiering system was nice. allowed good amount of SSD for saving some critical VMs.
Compellent Cons: licensing was confusing. Huge discounts, but the pre-discounted price was so high, it was scary. what if future purchases or expansions were not discounted as much. IOPS rating was lower for the same price point.
Nimble Pros: Lost cost of $/TB. You can expand capacity or performance non-disruptively without purchasing a new array. (although new controllers have high costs like a new array). Really awesome support, hardware monitoring by support, and cloud stats and analytics to predict problems before they happen.
Nimble Cons: Hybrid array does not allow enough space for "pinning" VMs into SSD unless you oversize the SSD portion of the array. If needed a lot, buy all flash array. no dedup on the model I have. now it is standard on almost all models, as of this week. compression ratio was lower than advertised (25% for me), but when I update the OS this will improve. compression improvements on Nimble OS 4 and 5. I have Nimble OS 3.
Tegile:
I don't know much about Tegile. I think they our competitive with Nimble in many areas. I read that they use a modified version of ZFS. Not knowning exactly what the changes were, they may still have the same weaknesses of ZFS, so do some research.
