Since 2010, DCIG Buyer’s Guides have been helping organizations make better technology purchasing decisions, faster. DCIG Buyer’s Guides drive time, and therefore cost, out of the technology selection process by helping enterprise technology purchasers understand key product considerations and by giving them access to normalized comparative feature data. This enables technology purchasers to quickly identify a short list of products that possess the features required by the organization and then focus their evaluation efforts on the short-listed products.
DCIG’s analysts do the leg work for enterprise technology purchasers by:
- Identifying a common technology need with many competing solutions but with little comparative data available to technology purchasers
- Scanning the environment to identify available products in the marketplace
- Gathering normalized data about the features each product supports
- Providing an objective, third-party evaluation of those features from an end-user perspective
- Describing key product considerations and important changes in the marketplace
- Presenting DCIG’s opinions and product feature data in a way that facilitates rapid feature-based comparisons
DCIG recently adopted a Body of Research approach that enables DCIG to be much more responsive to changes in the marketplace. In DCIG’s original approach, developing a particular buyer’s guide frequently required 9 months from identification of the need to publication of the buyer’s guide. Using DCIG’s updated body of research methodology, DCIG can produce a specific Buyer’s Guide Edition within two months of identifying the need.
By researching an extensive range of products and consolidating the collected data into a single topic-based data repository, DCIG has the flexibility to quickly and effectively analyze that data based on a wide variety of use cases. These use cases may be the traditional classifications based on features such as protocol support and scalability, or any set of features that define an emerging marketplace such as a specific application certification.
DCIG recently completed the first phase of its Enterprise Storage Array Body of Research. This body of research includes more than 130 products from more than 20 vendors. In order to keep this first phase of the research to a manageable scope, DCIG used the following inclusion and exclusion criteria:
- Must be available as an appliance that includes its own hardware and software
- Must be a traditional or hybrid array (the vendor must support a configuration that includes hard disk drives)
- Must support a dual, redundant controller configuration
- Must not be marketed as scale-out NAS
- Must not be marketed as an all-flash array
Scale-out NAS and all-flash arrays are certainly enterprise storage arrays, and overlap in many ways with products in this body of research. The second phase of DCIG’s enterprise storage array research will add these products to the DCIG Enterprise Storage Array Body of Research by the end of 2016.
DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of the DCIG 2016-17 Midmarket Enterprise Storage Array Buyer’s Guide as the first Buyer’s Guide Edition developed from this body of research. Other Buyer’s Guides based on this body of research will be published in the coming weeks and months, including the 2016-17 Midrange Unified Storage Array Buyer’s Guide and the 2016-17 High End Storage Array Buyer’s Guide.
The DCIG 2016-17 Midmarket Enterprise Storage Array Buyer’s Guide includes seventeen (17) storage arrays from the following ten (10) storage providers (in alphabetical order): AMI, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HPE, iXsystems, Nimble Storage, Pivot3, Seagate and Tegile. To identify products likely to be of greatest interest to midmarket organizations, DCIG evaluated arrays with a maximum raw storage of 500TB.
The arrays that met DCIG’s inclusion requirements and achieved a ranking of Good, Excellent or Recommended are included in this Buyer’s Guide. Most of the arrays are the “Lite” version in a series of products. The included products generally provide all of the features of other products in the series, but at a smaller scale and lower cost.
Like all prior DCIG Buyer’s Guides, the DCIG 2016-17 Midmarket Enterprise Storage Array Buyer’s Guide does the heavy lifting for organizations as they look to purchase a midmarket enterprise storage array by:
- Delineating the storage array features that are supported
- Weighting these features according to what end users consider most important
- Ranking each product
- Creating a standardized one-page data sheet for each product
The end result is that the DCIG 2016-17 Midmarket Enterprise Storage Array Buyer’s Guide drives time and cost out of the product selection process by enabling prospective buyers to do “at-a-glance” comparisons between many different arrays. The standardized one-page data sheets make it easy to do quick, side-by-side comparisons of midmarket storage arrays so organizations may quickly arrive at a short list of products that may meet their requirements.
The DCIG 2016-17 Midmarket Enterprise Storage Array Buyer’s Guide is available immediately through the DCIG Analysis Portal for subscribing users at https://portal. dcig.com. End users new to the DCIG Analysis Portal may register using this link to access this Buyer’s Guide.
End users registering to access this report via the DCIG Analysis Portal also gain access to the DCIG Interactive Buyer’s Guide (IBG). The IBG enables organizations take the next step in the product selection process by generating custom reports, including comprehensive side-by-side feature comparisons of the arrays in which the organization is most interested.