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Vendor Landscape: Mid-range to Entry Enterprise Storage Arrays

Select a consolidated storage vendor in an increasingly consolidated market.

Last Revised: November 15, 2012

More Details

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What is a Value Score?

The Value Score indexes each vendor’s product offering and business strength relative to their price point. It does not indicate vendor ranking.

Vendors that score high offer more bang for the buck (e.g. features, usability, stability, etc.) than the average vendor, while the inverse is true for those that score lower.

Price-conscious enterprises may wish to give the Value Score more consideration than those who are more focused on specific vendor/product attributes.

Champion

Vendor

Viability

Strategy

Reach

Channel

Total

You are currently over the vendor limit, please adjust your weightings to equal exactly 100%.

Product

Features

Usability

Affordability

Architecture

Total

You are currently over the product limit, please adjust your weightings to equal exactly 100%.

What matters more, the vendor score or the product score? As you weigh the importance, we will generate the vendor shortlist to match your needs.

NetApp

FAS3200/FAS6200 Series
Vendor: Product:

EMC

VNX5500, VNX5700, VNX7500
Vendor: Product:

Hitachi Data Systems

HUS 100, HUS VM
Vendor: Product:

Dell

Compellent SC8000 Controller
Vendor: Product:

IBM

Storwize V7000, XIV Gen3
Vendor: Product:

P10000 3 Par
Vendor: Product:

Nimbus Data

S-Class, E-Class, Gemini Sustainable Storage
Vendor: Product:

Pure Storage

FlashArray 300 Series
Vendor: Product:

Nexsan

E-Series (E48/60) NST 5000 series
Vendor: Product:

X-IO

Hyper ISE
Vendor: Product:

View Vendor Shortlist

What is a shortlist?

A shortlist is a personalized list of vendors based on the criteria above.
Your shortlist offers more information about vendor's strengths, weaknesses, price-points, etc, and ranks them according to your needs.

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Download the Storyboard Overview

Your Challenge

Mid-range to entry enterprise organizations need scalability. Understanding the methods and costs of scaling up or scaling out is important to keeping the budget in check.
Virtualization is driving up performance requirements. Server consolidation, utility computing, server virtualization, internal cloud: they all absolutely require a solid foundation of shared networked storage. However, networked storage is expensive and the vendor space is crowded with new startups making the landscape even more confusing.
Flash is solving the problem. Most storage vendors are capitalizing on flash as a tier or storage with autotiering, or as a cache, to improve performance and drive down dependence on spinning disk, making it all the more important to understand how and when to leverage this technology to meet changing business requirements.
Simplify the vendor landscape. This solution set will clearly describe the strengths and weaknesses of a full range of vendors in midrange storage, and will apply a range of scenarios to provide deeper insight into what solutions are best.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Start with the strategic drivers. For example, infrastructure consolidation and virtualization may have different requirements than providing capacity for a few high traffic OLTP databases.
Align the cost of the storage with the value of what is being stored. The fastest drive types (solid state drives), high redundancy (RAID and replication), and higher cost network switching (FC) may not be necessary for the value of much of what is being stored.
Balance necessary redundancy with improved utilization. Redundancy increases the cost per terabyte of data stored, but may be necessary to meet service levels (performance, availability, and recovery objectives). Utilization features enable doing more with less, decreasing the cost per terabyte of data stored through more efficient provisioning.

Impact and Result

Understand what kind of consolidated storage is appropriate for core needs and what kind of features boost storage value.
Create a shortlist of consolidated storage vendors and select which is the best fit for your organization and budget.

Get to Action

Narrow down the list of storage vendors
Invest in the right features and avoid overspending.
- Vendor Landscape Storyboard: Mid-range to Entry Enterprise Storage Arrays
- Mid-range to Entry Enterprise Storage Vendor Shortlist Tool

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