HPE Nimble Storage Support, without HPE

Park Place Hardware Maintenance


Paul Mercina December 12, 2019

Most customers had no idea when purchasing Nimble CS200, CS300, CS500, and CS700 equipment that they would ultimately be involved with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Once the Nimble Storage acquisition was finalized in April 2017, however, support for this hardware moved over to HPE.

All Nimble CS-Series Arrays Are Now Prime Candidates for Third Party Maintenance

That’s a shame because innovative Nimble storage features have made CS-Series Arrays a good fit for many business-critical applications, and the company had a reliable reputation for customer service. HPE support, on the other hand, hasn’t always been the right match for customers’ maintenance strategy. And with end of support life (EOSL) arriving for the CS-Series Array, there are important decisions to be made.

Fortunately, more options for Nimble storage support are coming online in 2020. Park Place Technologies will be offering a complete HPE support and maintenance solution for Nimble the CS200, CS300, CS500, and CS700 hybrid storage products.

Several Nimble Storage Arrays Reach EOSL

Alternative support choices are an urgent concern for several Nimble storage systems, which reach EOSL on December 31, 2019. The following events and models include:

Visit our complete list of HPE EOS dates for more information.

These arrays integrate HDDs and SSDs, use triple-parity RAID, and leverage a CPU-based storage architecture known as “Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout” (CASL) to allow for non-disruptive scaling. Customers have enjoyed being able to easily improve performance and capacity by adding disk shelves, CPU cores, and SSDs, as well as clustering in any combination. These features make Nimble CS-Series Arrays great candidates for post-EOSL service and extended lifespan. Consider the InfoSight tool set, which brings storage management, predictive analytics, and proactive alerts, and it’s easy to understand data center managers’ reluctance to part with Nimble storage.

That’s why Park Place Technologies is stepping in where HPE left off, so you can keep these systems operating at peak performance, without concerns about spare parts availability, engineering support, or remote monitoring.

All Nimble CS Products Are Ready for Third Party Maintenance

With release dates reaching back to 2015 and before, all Nimble CS-Series Arrays are now prime candidates for third party maintenance. As outlined in this Gartner report, IT hardware older than four years is unlikely to enjoy significant code updates, and the value of the expensive OEM maintenance from companies like HPE declines rapidly. Tapping 3rd party maintenance providers, like Park Place Technologies’ Nimble support solution, will slash at least 50% off annual contract costs, making it affordable and attractive to keep these innovative storage arrays in service for years to come.

Pre-EOSL and post-EOSL Nimble support from Park Place Technologies incorporates all of the features that make us the maintenance provider of choice for IT organizations that cannot compromise on support quality, responsiveness, or uptime. Key components include:

  • The simplicity of using a single source for multivendor support for products from HPE, Cisco, NetApp, Dell EMC, and many others
  • Level III-only engineering assistance and rapid response to questions and outages no matter where in the world the equipment is installed
  • ParkView managed IT services monitoring to streamline the hardware support process and reduce the number of touchpoints between you and a maintenance solution

These features are just the beginning of the Park Place Technologies uptime advantage, so contact us today to get a free quote on Nimble support and find out more about how we can help extend hardware lifespan while preserving reliability and performance.

About the Author

Paul Mercina, Director, Product Management Marketing
Paul Mercina brings over 20 years of experience in IT center project management to Park Place Technologies, where he oversees the product roadmap, growing the services portfolio, end-to-end development and release of new services to the market. His work is informed by 10+ years at Diebold Nixdorf, where he worked closely with software development teams to introduce new service design, supporting implementation of direct operations in a number of countries across the Americas, Asia and Europe.