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Vendor Landscape: Small to Mid-range 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.

Dell

EqualLogic
Vendor: Product:

NetApp

FAS2200 Series
Vendor: Product:

EMC

VNXe3150, VNXe3300, VNX5100, VNX5300
Vendor: Product:

Nexsan

E-Series (E18/48) NST 5100/5300
Vendor: Product:

StoreVirtual Storage
Vendor: Product:

Nimble Storage

CS200 Series, CS400 Series 250
Vendor: Product:

Tegile

Zebi HA2100, Zebi HA2100EP, Zebi HA2400, Zebi HA2800
Vendor: Product:

IceWEB

1000/2000/3000/6500/7000 Unified Storage System
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.

First Name:

Last Name:

Business Email:

Company:

Title:

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Download the Storyboard Overview

Your Challenge

Modest sized organizations do not necessarily have modest requirements. With leaner IT staff, these companies need easy to use, scalable solutions that achieve capacity and performance requirements at lowest possible costs.
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 your list of storage vendors
Invest in the right features and avoid overspending.
- Vendor Landscape Storyboard: Small to Mid-range Storage Arrays
- Small to Mid-range Storage Arrays Vendor Shortlist Tool

1 Comment

Carlos Garcia | 01-03-2013
Have you heard of Scale Computing storage?

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