DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of its 2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays report. This DCIG TOP 5 report provides information about the best arrays for providing uninterrupted access to the world’s most essential data.
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 multimillion-dollar ramifications; and an extended outage could affect a nation’s economy. 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. Many other organizations choose high-end storage arrays for the data that is essential to their own business operations.
Reimagining 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, half of all high-end storage arrays, including some of the DCIG TOP 5 products in this report, fit into 8RU or less—just fourteen inches of rack space. Thus, huge floor space requirements no longer define high-end storage.
Benefits of an Effective High-End Storage Solution
Performance and availability. An effective high-end storage solution provides consistent high performance and continuous availability for critical business workloads. To obtain this result, high-end storage must provide sufficient performance resources, storage capacity, and protocol support to serve the needs of these applications. High-end storage arrays must also secure and protect the data, integrate into data center management and automation frameworks, and integrate with common enterprise software applications.
Consolidation. High-end storage arrays provide scalable capacity and storage density that complement the performance resources of the arrays, providing remarkable performance per floor tile and increasing the amount of work any data center can deliver. Broad storage protocol support further enables high-end arrays to provide storage for nearly any workload.
Recent Advances in High-End Storage
One section of the report identifies some of the significant advances in high-end storage that have emerged since the publication of the 2020-21 DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays report. These advances include new capabilities or enhancements around:
- Cyber resilience
- Advances in using analytics (AIOps)
- Cloud integration
- Provision of object storage
- Storage as a Service (STaaS)
- Sustainability enhancements and reporting
The 2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays
In preparing this report, DCIG identified 14 products that met its criteria for high-end storage arrays. DCIG evaluated these arrays based on multiple features and capabilities. The general categories under which these features fell included:
- Acquisition and deployment options
- Workload consolidation features
- Performance management
- Efficiency features
- Data protection and security features
- Technical support
Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following high-end arrays a DCIG TOP 5 ranking (in alphabetical order):
- Dell PowerMax Series (8500/2500)
- Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series (5600)
- Huawei OceanStor Dorado V6 Series (18000/8000)
- Infinidat InfiniBox Series (InfiniBox SSA II/InfiniBox)
- NetApp AFF A-Series (A900)
Similarities among the DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays
While many of the other high-end storage arrays support some of these features, the DCIG TOP 5 generally offer broader or more complete support for:
- Performance at scale
- The full range of storage protocols
- Multiple acquisition and deployment options
- Multiple public cloud targets
- Capacity optimization features
- Snapshot features, including VM level using VVol
- Replication topologies, including 3 and 4 data centers
- Security technologies such as two-factor authentication, hardware root of trust, and
- WORM file format
- Quality of Service (QoS) options
- VMware integrations
- Pre-built integrations into automation frameworks
- Proactive support and the use of predictive analytics
By supporting the features listed above, these high-end arrays can supply and consolidate storage for many enterprise applications.
REPORT AVAILABILITY
Reports based on DCIG’s research into High-End Storage Arrays are available for download at no charge by following one of these links:
The full TOP 5 report is available for download immediately. The full report:
- Describes the need for, and the attributes of, high-end storage arrays
- Reveals significant recent advances in high-end storage
- Explains the key similarities and differences between the TOP 5 products
- Contains a profile of each TOP 5 solution that describes some outstanding or distinctive features that helped each array earn a spot in the 2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays report
Huawei OceanStor Dorado V6 Series (18000/8000) Solution Profile
Infinidat InfiniBox Series (InfiniBox SSA II/InfiniBox) Solution Profile
Copyright Reminder
Other than excerpts from this report published in this announcement, the contents of the 2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays report are copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. Individuals may access the full report by following this link and completing the required registration information.
Be Notified of Future DCIG TOP 5 Reports
DCIG will release more TOP 5 reports in the coming weeks and months. To be apprised of these announcements, please sign up for the weekly DCIG Newsletter so we may notify you of their availability.