At the beginning of 2014, I started the year with the theme: “it’s an exciting time to be part of the DCIG team“. This was due to the explosive growth we saw in website visits and popularity of our Buyer’s Guides. That hasn’t changed. DCIG Buyer’s Guides continue to grow in popularity, but what’s even more exciting is the diversity of our new products and services. This year’s theme is diversity: a range of different things. DCIG is expanding…again…in different directions.
In the past year, we have added a number of offerings to our repertoire of products and services. In addition to producing our popular Buyer’s Guides and well known blogs, we now offer Competitive Research Services, Executive Interviews, Executive White papers, Lead Generation, Special Reports and Webinars. Even more unique, DCIG now offers an RFP/RFI Analysis Software Suite. This suite gives anyone (vendor, end-user or technology reseller) the ability to license the same software that DCIG uses internally to develop its Buyer’s Guide. In this way, you may use the software to do your internal technology assessments with your own scores and rankings so that the results align more closely with your specific business needs.
While we diversify our portfolio, it’s important to note that we also increased our Buyer’s Guide publication output by nearly 40% to thirteen (13) over our 2013 publications. We also contracted for over 30 Competitive Advantage reports in 2014. This success is largely due the well-planned timeline, more clearly defined processes, and the addition of new analysts. The team is busy and here is a sneak peek at the Buyer’s Guides that they are currently working on during the first half of 2015 (in order of target release date):
Hybrid Storage Array: Hybrid Storage Array is a physical storage appliance that dynamically places data in a storage pool that combines flash memory and HDD storage (and in some cases NVRAM and/or DRAM) resources by intelligently caching data and metadata and/or by automatically moving data from one performance tier to another. The design goal of a hybrid storage array is to typically provide sub-2-millisecond response times associated with flash memory storage arrays with capacity and cost similar to HDD-based arrays.
SDS Server SAN: A new Buyer’s Guide for DCIG, the SDS Server SAN is a collection of servers combining compute, memory and internal DAS storage, which enables organizations to remove the need to for external storage in a virtualized environment. The SDS Server SAN software provides the glue between the compute and storage portions of the environment allowing for clustering of not only the virtual host but the underlying file system as well. SDS Server SAN’s typically bundle compute, storage and hypervisors and employ the usage of SSD as a tier for storage caching; SAS and/or SATA HDDs for data storage; and, support of one or more hypervisors.
Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance: A Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance is a physical appliance that comes prepackaged with server, storage and backup software. What makes this Buyer’s Guide stand apart from the Integrated Backup Appliances is that the Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance must support backup both locally and to cloud providers. In this new Buyer’s Guide for DCIG, DCIG evaluates which cloud provider or providers that the appliance natively supports, the options it offers to backup to the cloud and even what options are available to recover data and/or applications with a cloud provider.
Private Cloud Storage Array: Private Cloud Storage Array is a physical storage appliance located behind an organization’s firewall that enables the delivery of storage as a service to end users within an enterprise. Private cloud storage brings the benefits of public cloud storage to the enterprise—rapid provisioning/de-provisioning on storage resources through self-service tools and automated management, scalability, and REST API support for cloud-native apps—while still meeting corporate data protection, security and compliance requirements
Flash Memory Storage Array: The Flash Memory Buyer’s Guide is a refresh from 2014. The flash array is a solid state storage disk system that contains multiple flash memory drives instead of hard disk drives.
Unified Communications: Another new guide for DCIG, Unified communications (UC) is any system that integrates real-time and non-real-time enterprise communication services such as voice, messaging, instant messaging, presence, audio and video conferencing and mobility features. The purpose of UC is to provide a consistent user-interface and experience across multiple devices and media-types.
Watch the latter half of the year as DCIG plans to refresh Buyer’s Guides on the following topics:
- Big Data Tape Library
- Deduplicating Backup Appliance
- High End Storage Array
- Integrated Backup Appliance
- Midrange Unified Storage
- SDS Storage Virtualization
- Virtual Server Backup Software
We also have other topics that we are evaluating as the basis for new Buyer’s Guides so look for announcements on their availability in the latter half of this year.