The third year of the Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards for enterprise arrays saw some shifts among the vendors, but a familiar theme prevailed as Hitachi Data Systems won again.
In horse racing, it's called the Triple Crown. In bowling, it's known as a turkey and in hockey, it's a hat trick. We're inclined to call Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Corp.'s three victories in a row in the Diogenes Labs–Storage magazine Quality Award for enterprise arrays "remarkable."
"Their hardware is rock solid," says Carlo Tosti, technical specialist at TD Bank Financial Group in Toronto. Tosti's group has a variety of HDS TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) and Lightning 9900 Series arrays in its shop, which over the years has evolved into an all-HDS environment. Keith Fisher, manager of information processing in the Office of Information Technology for the State of NJ, concurs with Tosti. At one point, the state agency had a mix of EMC Corp., HDS and IBM Corp. storage. "As the boxes got old, went away and we bought new stuff, it was all Hitachi," says Fisher.
Sun Microsystems Inc. rebounded nicely in the 2007 survey, rising from 2006's last-place finish (see "
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Quality Awards II: The elite of enterprise arrays," Storage, September 2006) to second this year. Sun's systems had scored well in 2005 (second), but Sun was the apparent victim of organizational upheaval following the StorageTek acquisition in 2006. Last year, EMC moved up to third from fifth place in 2005, and held onto third again this year. Interestingly, EMC is sandwiched between two HDS resellers: Sun and Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co., which finished fourth overall. IBM slipped from a fourth-place finish in the previous two surveys to fifth this year, but by the slimmest of margins (.01 points behind HP). Network Appliance (NetApp) Inc. was included in our enterprise array survey for the first time. NetApp has generally fared well in our NAS surveys, but its last-place finish among SAN arrays illustrates how brutally competitive the enterprise category can be. 3PAR was also included in our survey, but for a second year failed to garner enough responses to be statistically valid and couldn't be considered for the award.
This was first published in July 2007