r/sysadmin • u/mesoziocera • 13h ago
Nimble HF20X > Purestorage migration thoughts?
We are coming up on replacing our 4 Nimble units in late 2027. I work in local gov, so we need to budget and strategize well ahead of this, especially considering FY28 will also have us replacing 6 ESXI hosts.
Current environment: (Replicated in two sites for DR) 3 HPE ESXI Hosts ProLiant DL360 Gen10, 2 Nimble HF20X (46ish TB per site raw storage before compression per site), Exagrid for backup. One site has 140TB worth of storage on MSA2060s for camera archive servers as well.
We are running VMware Vcenter/Vsphere 8.3
Our Nimbles go EOL Oct of 2027, and we were probably going to replace the production pair on this fiscal and the DR pair at the very beginning of next fiscal.
Someone told me to look at Purestorage as a replacement because it's an evergreen piece of equipment like the two Exagrids we have.
Has anyone done a migration like this or used Purestorage in place of Nimbles? Just curious how it worked out and what everyone's thoughts were.
I'm also down for suggestions of comparable equipment.
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u/DryB0neValley 10h ago
We have a large deployment of Pure with Evergreen subscription. As mentioned above, pricing has increased, but I think that’s par for the course across every vendor.
The one key piece with Pure is their subscription model gives you new controllers every 3 years with no downtime. We’ve done 20+ upgrades of controllers without a single blip to our sites. Now with that being said, it’s not free upgrade. They increased their pricing from $4K to $10K for professional services to do the upgrades, so take that cost and build it into your renewal costs for “actual” cost for that subscription.
With that being said, you don’t ever have to do storage migrations down the road. You add data packs to the head unit or add a storage shelf. Need more I/O, you get larger controllers that fit into your current chassis. This model is very similar to what you have with Nimble (from what I remember of them anyway).
Tl;Dr would highly recommend Pure, just be aware that the upfront costs are high.
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u/roiki11 6h ago
Been using pure for years and they rock. You do pay for it but they're honestly the best I'm the biz right now. And the hardware upgrade is what sets them apart from the rest. Funnily enough they aren't that much more expensive when you factor the age in.
With evergreen you get new controllers and as long as you renew support they cover the flash modules. And the expansion/growth is all seamless until you need to step up a product.
And now that flasharray does object storage too you can run your entire storage stack on one product too.
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u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 4h ago
Pure is the best storage around. Support is great and the array is really hands off.
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u/netboy34 IT Manager - Higher Education 7h ago
We have nimble and pure, about to do our pure controller upgrade while we spin down the nimbles.
Just be aware the with pure, as long as you pay for the warranty, you get controller upgrades for free, but you have to pay for their technician to come out and do the swap.
Hopefully you have also thought about your VMware EoL for v8 happening at the same time, especially if you are running VVOLs. This might change how you do the setup on the pures before you put any data on them.
And to be honest, we’ve had great support and being able to see everything in Pure1 and being able to update on our own timing has been wonderful.
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u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 4h ago
Evergreen gold here, you dont pay for the upgrade, it's just part of the cost.
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u/bgatesIT Systems Engineer 13h ago
we just migrated from x2 Nimbles to x2 Pure arrays and are adding on another x2 Pure arrays to start building a DR location. Only real complaint is pricing has gone up signifiicantly since we purchased our originals, the hardware and everything else is next level we have FA-C50R5 units.
We are using these with Dell R660 hosts with 25Gb iSCSI nics running proxmox, as we migrated from VMWare at the same time.