DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the inaugural DCIG 2020-21 TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays report. This DCIG TOP 5 report provides enterprises with guidance on the best storage solutions for consolidated, continuous access to the data that drives their businesses.
The Critical Need for High-end Storage Arrays
Organizations that provide critical infrastructure to the rest of society must provide uninterrupted service availability—even in the event of a disaster. In hospitals, an interruption in service could mean life or death for a patient. In financial institutions, a brief outage could easily have multi-million dollar ramifications; and an extended outage could have a measurable impact on a nation’s economy as a whole.
Organizations in these and other critical industries—such as telecommunications, energy utilities, and transportation—depend on high-end storage arrays to provide uninterrupted access to the world’s most essential data.
Re-imagining High-End Storage
If your mental image of a high-end storage array is rack after rack full of blinking lights, you would be right only 30% of the time. Today, nearly half of all high-end storage arrays, including some of the TOP 5 products in this report, support configurations that fit into less than 8RU—that is just fourteen inches of rack space. Thus, huge floor space requirements no longer define high-end storage.
A high-end storage array must meet a wide array of enterprise requirements. Key attributes include high performance with high-availability. High-end storage must also integrate into data center management and automation practices, and with critical software applications to secure and protect the data.
The DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays
In preparing this report, DCIG identified thirty-five different solutions that met its inclusion criteria. To determine the TOP 5, DCIG evaluated each of these solutions across a wide range of enterprise storage capabilities including:
- Performance resources
- Capacity and density
- Availability and data protection features
- Hypervisor and container integrations
- Storage virtualization capabilities
- Acquisition and deployment options
- Predictive analytics and proactive support
Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following high-end storage arrays a TOP 5 ranking:
Similarities among the TOP 5 High-end Storage Arrays
Beyond meeting the criteria for inclusion, the TOP 5 High-end Storage Arrays from Dell Technologies, Hitachi Vantara, Huawei, IBM, and NetApp share the following characteristics:
- Scale out to at least eight (8) controllers for high availability and scalability
- Quality-of-service (QoS) options that facilitate confident consolidation of many workloads
- Support NVMe media to enable consistent low-latency
- Data efficiency features including compression and inline deduplication
- Robust virtualization integrations
- Predictive analytics, including capacity planning, and proactive support to maximize uptime
- Available on-premises as-a-Service
Differences between the TOP 5 High-end Storage Arrays
One of the greatest differentiators among high-end storage arrays is support for storage virtualization. Four of the TOP 5 can integrate and manage the storage capacity of other vendors’ arrays. This extends new capabilities to old storage and reduces storage management overhead. The extent of this capability varies significantly, even among the TOP 5, but generally includes tiering, compression, and deduplication.
Other differentiators between the products include:
- Performance resources
- Storage capacity and density
- Acquisition and deployment options
- Performance claims around latency and throughput
- NVMe/FC support
- Hybrid cloud capabilities
- Public cloud integrations
TOP 5 Report Availability
The full TOP 5 report is available for download immediately. The full report contains additional details such as:
- A deeper explanation of the key similarities and differences between the TOP 5 products
- A profile of each TOP 5 solution that describes key ways each one distinguishes itself from the other solutions
You may access the full five-page report by following the link below.
Download the DCIG 2020-21 TOP 5 High-End Storage Array from the DCIG website
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