QUALITY AWARDS III: NetApp sweeps NAS awards

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As indicated earlier, overall user satisfaction was high, with 82% of respondents willing to make the same purchase decision again. In this important measure, IBM again topped NetApp, and this time in both categories. Its enterprise customers indicated a willingness to repurchase 90.9% of the time, and an even higher 95.5% of the time with midrange products. Previous surveys have often found high loyalty among IBM users.

Nevertheless, NetApp did have solid support among its users. In its case, 86.8% of enterprise users would make the same decision, while 82.4% of midrange users would do so. HP had solid numbers above 80%, while EMC had 78% (midrange) and 76.9% (enterprise). Sun trailed the enterprise group with a 64.3% user loyalty. Regardless, it's safe to say that while NAS users have the occasional bone to pick, they're apparently a happy group of people.

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About the survey: The Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards are designed to identify and recognize products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use. The results are derived from a survey of qualified Storage readers who assessed products in five main categories: sales-force competence, product features, initial product quality, product reliability and technical support. Products are rated on a 1.0-8.0 scale, where 8.0 is the most favorable score.

While our survey includes the spectrum of NAS vendors, a vendor must have at least 13 responses to be statistically valid and therefore considered as a finalist. This year, 274 respondents rated 492 systems. That's fewer respondents than 2007, but in line with the 2006 response rate. The lower response rate probably impacted smaller vendors the most, as we didn't have any of the smaller vendors crack the finalist list.

Just under half of the survey respondents (49.3%) had only one vendor, while the rest had two or more. The largest group of respondents was for the NetApp FAS2000/3000/6000 series of systems with 114. EMC Corp. Celerra had the second highest number of respondents with 67. Although the largest response groups were for enterprise systems, the survey was tilted toward the small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME). SMEs, or those organizations with less than $1 billion in revenue, comprise 62% of the survey respondents. The largest industry segment was financial with 6.3% of respondents, followed by IT services with 5.9%. Given that 14 different industries were represented, the survey population provided information from a broad spectrum of the marketplace.

PRODUCTS: The following products were included in the third Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Award III for NAS survey.

Enterprise: BlueArc Corp. Titan 2000 series*; EMC Corp. Celerra; Exanet Inc. ExaStore EX200FC/400FC/600FC*; Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. StorageWorks Enterprise File Services (EFS); Hitachi Data Systems Corp. Lightning/NAS Blade for TagmaStore USP and Network Controller, AMS1000/500/200 and WMS100 with NAS option*; IBM Corp. System Storage N7000; NetApp FAS2000/3000/6000; Panasas Inc. ActiveStor Storage Cluster*; Sun Microsystems Inc. StorageTek 5310/5320
Midrange: Adaptec Inc. Snap Server 520/650*, Agami Systems AIS3000 series/AIS6000 series*, BlueArc Titan 1100*, Dell Inc. PowerVault NF500/600 and NX1950, EMC NS series, Exanet ExaStore EX200S/400S/600S*, NetApp FAS200/900, HP ProLiant DL storage servers, IBM System Storage N3000/5000, Isilon Systems Inc. Isilon IQ*, ONStor Inc. Pantera 2200/5000*, Sun StorageTek 5210/5220*

* Didn't receive enough responses to be included in the final results

This was first published in June 2008

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