Quality Awards II: The elite of enterprise arrays

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Hitachi Data Systems repeats as winner of the second edition of the Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards for enterprise arrays.


Nothing symbolizes the prestige of storage in a data center more than enterprise-class disk arrays. Discussions about enterprise arrays are always more emotional and intense than other storage product categories, and justifiably so. That emotion is driven by the reality that "Tier-1" enterprise storage holds the data that fuels the organization's most demanding applications. Mission-critical application failure can cost businesses millions of dollars in seconds. Although vendors talk in terms of "nines of service," in practice, IT organizations are upset if their enterprise arrays ever fail.

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Products in our survey
The following vendors and products were included in the 2006 Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Award survey for enterprise arrays:
  • EMC Corp. Symmetrix 3000 Series, 8000 Series,DMX Series or DMX-3 Series
  • Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. StorageWorks XP Series
  • Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Lightning 99xx V Series or TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) Series
  • IBM Corp. ESS TotalStorage ("Shark") F Series, 800 Series, 800 Turbo Series or DS8000 Series
  • Sun Microsystems Inc. StorEdge 99xx Series
  • 3PAR Inc. InServ Storage Server S400 or S800*
*Too few responses to be statistically relevant

Because system reliability is so important to IT consumers, Diogenes Labs and Storage magazine have again teamed up to determine which enterprise arrays (see "Products in our survey," at right) best deliver on their promise. These awards are determined by a detailed survey sent to Storage readers that quantifies users' experiences in five categories:

  • Sales-force competence
  • Product features
  • Initial product quality
  • Product reliability
  • Technical support
We find this methodology particularly compelling because it's not a popularity contest with an outcome predetermined by market share. Respondent lists are strictly controlled and individual responses are screened to ensure their validity. Results from the surveys are tabulated and analyzed by an independent statistician who has no connection to the storage industry (see "About the survey" and "Survey respondents"). Vendors aren't allowed to nominate products and they're not notified that the surveys are taking place. The results of the surveys are disclosed to vendors at the time of their publication in Storage.

This was first published in September 2006

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