Top 10 Most Read Blog Entries of 2013 Written in 2013; #10 – #6

At the end of each year DCIG takes time to reflect and look back on what were the most viewed blog entries on its website by the number of page views. In reviewing these blog entries, we start by first looking at the most viewed blog entries of 2013 written in 2013 starting with #6 through #10. This year’s page views revealed a shake-up from past years as it is becoming clear that people in general and IT staff specifically increasingly look to DCIG to provide them with informed, insightful looks on which IT technologies to buy.
#10 – DCIG 2013 Midrange Unified Storage Array Buyer’s Guide Now Available.  Jerome Wendt. This blog entry announced the availability of DCIG’s inaugural Midrange Unified Storage Array Buyer’s Guide. This Buyer’s Guide evaluates over 100 features on 30 different storage arrays from eight (8) different storage providers. This Buyer’s Guide is specifically targeted at small and midsized enterprises that need a single storage array to consolidate their data while serving a variety of purposes (file server, hosting high performance data and even as a backup target) for multiple applications. This Buyer’s Guide in its entirety may be downloaded with registration by following this link.
#9 – Preview of the 2013 DCIG Private Cloud Storage Array Buyer’s Guide. Ben Maas. Scale-out storage architectures started coming into their own in 2011 as an ideal way for companies to start small with a small storage deployment and then scale larger as they minimized/eliminated the need for doing data migrations, simplified storage management and helped control costs. While initially targeted for archiving and backup purposes, by 2013, these scale-out architectures were ready for wider deployment in production environments and had become the backbone for creating private storage clouds.
In this refreshed release of the DCIG 2011 Scale-Out Storage Buyer’s Guide, DCIG changed the Guide’s name to reflect its intended use case in enterprises. In this particular blog entry, DCIG’s Senior Analyst Ben Maas examines how DCIG updated its criteria to include coverage of new generations of storage systems that were “private cloud storage arrays.”  Examples of new products covered included those were all-flash, offered ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) and used virtual controllers. Notable results when examining the results of these Guides is that 62% scaled to over 1 PB in total capacity and 60% integrated with the VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). The DCIG 2013 Private Cloud Storage Array Buyer’s Guide itself may be downloaded with registration by following this link.
#8 – Early Insights from the Upcoming DCIG 2014 Enterprise Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide. Ken Clipperton. As DCIG was preparing the third refresh of this Buyer’s Guide, I have to admit, I had some reservations about doing so. DCIG already had six (6) different versions of  Buyer’s Guides on midrange arrays in the works and more variations on this topic planned so I wondered, “Had the original topic for which DCIG had created its Buyer’s Guides become obsolete?” As this blog entry and the ensuing furor that the release of this Buyer’s Guide eventually generated, the answer was clearly a resounding, “No!”
Every time DCIG refreshes a Buyer’s Guide, it always take time to go back and evaluate what has stayed the same and what new factors it needs to consider prior to the release of a particular Guide. In this particular, we still evaluated factors that will always remain important when selecting a midrange array such as capacity, storage networking capabilties and and storage management features. But as DCIG’s Managing Analyst Ken Clipperton reveals in this blog entry, new factors such as data center automation, VMware integration and flash memory support played a larger role than in previous years in our weighting of the midrange array models included in the DCIG 2014 Enterprise Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide. The DCIG 2014 Enterprise Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide itself may be downloaded by following this link.
#7 – DCIG 2013 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide Now Available.  Ken Clipperton. Flash is smoking hot right now in the technology space and not just from a performance perspective. As this blog entry suggests, people are interested in all things flash to include Buyer’s Guides on the topic. This blog entry announces the availability of this Buyer’s Guide which examines 34 different storage arrays from ten (10) different storage providers and ranks and scores each of them. The DCIG 2013 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide is still available and may be downloaded for no charge with registration by following this link.
#6 – DCIG 2013 High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide Now Available). Jerome Wendt. As if it were not already apparent, here is yet another blog entry talking about yet another DCIG Buyer’s Guide announcement. In this blog entry, DCIG discusses the release of its inaugural High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide which evaluates 13 different software solutions from 10 different software providers. While our expectations for this Guide were fairly modest going into it as there were only a relatively few number of products in this space (compared to other Buyer’s Guides that DCIG produces,) this one has garnered a lot of interest as evidenced by the large number of page views this blog entry announcing its availability has generated. The DCIG 2013 High Availability and Cluster Software Buyer’s Guide itself may be downloading by following this link (registration required.)
Tomorrow I will cover the Top 5 most viewed blog entries on DCIG’s website written in 2013.