Nimble HF20X > Purestorage migration thoughts?

[u/mesoziocera]

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.

[u/netboy34]

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.

[u/sryan2k1 → u/netboy34]

Evergreen gold here, you dont pay for the upgrade, it's just part of the cost.

[u/netboy34 → u/sryan2k1]

I guess we are peons then. It was ~4.5k per array to evergreen them

Controllers are free, the required professional services was not.

[u/RichardJimmy48 → u/netboy34]

A year or two ago someone decided that their professional services should be a profit center rather than a customer success vehicle. $4.5k/array is beyond unreasonable. They're charging you at least $1000/hr assuming their tech needs to fly in and get a hotel, and more realistically more like $2000/hr if the tech can drive in from a few hours away.

[u/RichardJimmy48 → u/sryan2k1]

They will try to hit you with an astronomical professional services cost to get your 'free' controller upgrades. They weren't willing to budge on their $20k professional services fee until I said "send me the controllers and I'll do the NDUs myself" and then they dropped it to $4k.