DCIG is pleased to announce the DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide. This Buyer’s Guide helps organizations assess the enterprise all-flash array marketplace and identify which array may be the best fit for their environment.
The Buyer’s Guide includes data sheets for 17 enterprises’ all-flash array series that achieved rankings of Recommended and Excellent. Nine vendors offer these products, including Dell EMC, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage, Kaminario (now Silk), and Tintri.
Enterprises replacing their legacy storage systems have a transformational data center and business opportunity. The data storage landscape has changed dramatically over the last several years. For any business looking to refresh its storage infrastructure, these changes create a whole new world of possibilities.
All-Flash Array Innovation Goes Beyond Performance
The current generation of enterprise all-flash arrays may deliver order-of-magnitude improvements over legacy storage across multiple vectors, including latency, capacity, and density. Beyond performance claims, these arrays transform the storage ownership experience along several vectors, to include:
- Sophisticated storage analytics with proactive technical support to maximize availability and application performance
- New acquisition and deployment options, including storage-as-a-service and in the public cloud
- Automation of provisioning and ongoing storage management tasks
Advantages of Upgrading to the All-Flash Arrays Presented in this Buyer’s Guide
Any organization that has not yet adopted an all-flash storage infrastructure for its active workloads operates at a competitive disadvantage. The enterprise all-flash storage arrays presented in this Guide can:
- Help organizations move faster
- Make existing applications run faster even as data sets grow
- Accelerate application development
- Enable IT departments to say, “Yes” to new workloads and then get those new workloads producing results in record time
- Drive down data center operating costs
How the DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide Helps Decision-makers
It is in this context that DCIG presents its 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide. As in the development of all prior DCIG Buyer’s Guides, DCIG does the heavy lifting for enterprise technology buyers by:
- Identifying a common technology need with competing solutions
- 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 the rapid comparisons of various products and product features
DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide Product Rankings
Source: DCIGThe enterprise all-flash arrays that DCIG ranks as Recommended or Excellent are as follows:
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria for this Buyer’s Guide
All arrays included in this Buyer’s Guide satisfy the following criteria:
- Product is available in an all-flash configuration
- Support at least two controllers that may be configured as highly available to facilitate rapid failover (in a minute or less) and uninterrupted access to data
- Support availability through hot swap components including controllers, drives, fans, and power supplies.
- Support at least one replication method
- Support Fibre Channel connectivity
- Support VMware virtualized environments
- Is intended for the storage of production data (as opposed to archive or backup data)
- Scale-out or scale-up to more than 500 TB of raw capacity
- Have 24x7x365 access to technical support staff of the vendor
- Opportunity to receive support from an onsite technician
- Must be formally announced and/or generally available for purchase as of May 1, 2020
A product or product model that might have been expected to appear in this Buyer’s Guide may have been excluded for various reasons. These may include, but are not limited to:
- The product was not announced prior to the cutoff date
- The product has been discontinued or is no longer being marketed
- The product did not meet the inclusion criteria
- The product did not rank sufficiently high
- DCIG is unable to find sufficient product information to draw meaningful conclusions
- DCIG received no feedback from the vendor about its product
Independently Developed by DCIG
Like all DCIG Buyer’s Guides, DCIG conducted its research independently and without vendor sponsorship. In that vein, there are several important facts to keep in mind when considering the information contained in the Buyer’s Guide and its merit.
- No vendor paid DCIG any fee to research this topic or arrive at predetermined conclusions
- DCIG did not guarantee any vendor it would include its product in this Guide
- DCIG did not imply or guarantee that a specific product would receive a preferential ranking
- DCIG based its research upon publicly available information, the information provided by the vendor, and/or the expertise of those evaluating the information
- No negative inferences can be drawn against any vendor not included in the Buyer’s Guide
- In every case the vendor only found out the rankings of its product(s) after DCIG completed its analysis
Copyrighted, Yet Available at No Cost for Individual Use
Other than excerpts published on the DCIG website, the contents of the DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide are copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. However, Huawei has licensed the Buyer’s Guide and will make it available for download and individual use at no cost.
Download the DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide
DCIG covers developments in enterprise storage and data protection. If you haven’t already done so, please sign up for the weekly DCIG Newsletter so that DCIG may keep you informed of these ongoing developments.