George,
First I want to say that I was in your shoes previously at the company I used to work at. First some background on me. I do not work for Nimble or Netapp or any other storage vendor or IT company. I am in IT at the company I currently work at. I am sort of a generalist now. Managing the network, storage, vms, servers, phones, etc. etc... And before anyone flies off the handle about any comments I might make one way or the other make sure you read the entire post. In the end it all boils down to what you believe is best for your organization and not what some salesperson tells you or quotes from some person that works at Gartner fells might be good. (I would not listen to anything Gartner says nor do i care what their magic quadrant might claim or pretend to show)
My previous employment was as a storage engineer. The company I worked at had 2 Netapp filers. 3020 and 3140s in two geographically separated locations. I was able to get all trained up and learned to work on the netapps and really enjoyed them and the features that we had purchased with them. Previously I worked as a consultant at an IT outsource company and had experience with HP, Dell, and some other smaller vendors sans so Netapp was a step up. We had snapmanager for exchange and ossv and I really like both. We didnt see any performance hits BUT we did have occasional issues with exchange snapshots hanging. I dont know if this was because we never upgraded to ontap 8 or what but that was one hit against Netapp. The others were because we had to purchase each piece of software that we wanted to use with the storage. For example, for snapmanager for exchange, that was a seperate license you had to buy. For ISCSI, another license. For NFS another.. and so on. This has always been a serious negative for me with Netapp. Just give me the software features and charge a bit more. Don't nickle and dime me for each and every thing.
When it came time for us to either refresh our Netapp setup and go with a newer filer or look elsewhere we did some digging into all of the potential alternatives. While i would like to take credit for finding nimble I cant. That was my boss. He came across them and asked me to check them out. I did and i was impressed with much of what i was reading. Of course again you have to understand that much of what you read anymore out there is now so diluted by marketing folks or the platform-radicals that skewer anyone that doesn't follow their beliefs for a particular platform, that its very hard to get good real hard and unbiased info. (This is the same for cars, computers, phones, etc. etc) So I did my best to get info together on all of the major and many minor storage vendors out there and we sat down and compared info. We wanted to shrink the field some first so we could have a smaller pool to work with and determine which would best meet our needs and which would offer the best value for our money. (I even considered building my own pod system at one point!)
After months of research we had several companies that we contacted and asked to submit bids as well as reasons why they were the best choice. (NOTE TO SALESMAN: DO NOT STATE TO A CUSTOMER THE REASON WHY YOU ARE A BETTER CHOICE IS BECAUSE THE OTHER COMPANY SUCKS!! yes this actually happened, and no it wasn't Netapp that said this, they and the others were professional.) I will say that cost was a very important consideration for us. But then again isn't that for everyone? In the end we went with Nimble. Please note that the final 4 vendors we had picked to compare each offered to loan us a system to test out which i was very happy to see them all do.
During the time we made the switch I continued to use our netapp system. Like I said I was very happy with the Netapp and it functioned well. In the 3+ years I was there we had 2 drives die out of 200+ spinning disks, (A combination of 15k, 10k and 7.2k) not to shabby. The support at netapp seemed to ebb and flow. We had periods where it would be very good and the response time was within 2 hours and then we would hit periods where the response time was horrible and we wouldn't get contacted back for 1-2 days. I did complain to our local rep and he was able to get it squared away however 6 months passed and blame we hit that wall again, so i contacted him again and it was again resolved. Other than that things went well. OSSV I used extensively and was one of the few users in the State actually making use of it on the scale I was. I had some 30-40 remote sites that were sending ossv backups to me each night. It worked flawlessly.
For the time I was at my previous employer and when we switched to nimble at first there was concern because they were still very new and we had concerns that we might go to call on something and no one would be on the other end of the phone. There were concerns about support response times as well. But I'm happy to say neither of those was an issue. We went with two 10GB systems (CS220s I think) and the performance was exceptional. Support calls were answered and responded to in under 4 hours. (Most were 2 hours or less) We did run into a problem with the exchange snapshot verification however that was because we did not have the exchange storage group sized correctly. We did have to replace 2 drives (the mechanical ones not the ssd) as well as a power supply board however both were very easy to do. Of course the powersupply board replacement did require an outage. Hard drive replacement is just as easy on nimble as it is on Netapp. At first there was no single pain of glass for checking on the different arrays but that is no longer an issue with the webportal. Now you can't create a new volume from the portal which i would consider a hit against nimble. But then again you couldn't really manage the Netapps from a single pane either unless that changed under 8?
Fast forward to the current company I work at and we also were looking for storage when I came on board. We looked at all of the vendors again and decided we would go with Nimble because they offered us the best value. Again the Netapp platform was priced well above what we felt we wanted or needed for features. (If you need CIFS, NFS or snapmanager then go with Netapp.) If you are looking for simple storage and not having to worry about volume overhead then go with Nimble. Support with Nimble has still been very good. Of course there are some minor issues i have with them but none of those have been deal breakers. If you want to know those I'd be happy to share them. Just shoot me a PM and I'll get back to you.
In any event I would say figure out exactly what you need from your storage and then provide that to the vendors and have them battle it out. (Cage match works well)
I am not some die-hard storage fanatic that has to have one vendor over another. In the end they all provide access to storing your 1's and 0's.. its just who is going to give you the most bang for your bucks. for me that was Nimble. For you it might be Netapp and if so that is great.
Sorry if this seems to ramble about a bit. I am trying to put this together through this forum. I really should sit down and right out a paper on the whole process to help better explain it. But then I'd have to do like Gartner and charge you 100000 for it.
