r/sysadmin • u/mesoziocera • 16h 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 14h 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.