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In our Quality Awards survey, some familiar--and not so familiar--NAS names won in the enterprise and midrange categories.
After seeing the results of the Diogenes Labs–Storage magazine Quality Award for NAS, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Corp. users can be forgiven if they indulge in an "I told you so" moment. HDS not only won the enterprise NAS category, but captured the top spot for its enterprise SAN array in a previous Quality Award survey. And it accomplished this twin feat by outpolling much more established competition in each survey.
Network Appliance (NetApp) Inc. is generally the first company that comes to mind when people think of NAS, and the company has parlayed that popularity into solid results in our survey. NetApp was the clear winner in the midrange NAS category and placed a close second to HDS in the enterprise category. With three NetApp boxes installed and another planned as a SAN array replacement, Brian Mitchell particularly likes NetApp's management capabilities. "I'm really pleased with it," says Mitchell, a systems administrator at Atlanta-based TRX Inc., a provider of transaction processing and data integration services to the travel industry. "Basically, it allows me to manage the data, not the devices."
Our results strongly suggest that, as rated by Storage readers, NetApp has the most compelling total NAS product line from top to bottom. This is especially true for standalone NAS because our survey included gateways and NAS blades. In fact, the HDS system in the survey was a NAS blade for Lightning and TagmaStore systems. Hitachi's high-availability features sold Bruce Georgeson, an IT consultant at CGI-AMS, a Phoenix-based consulting firm. "If you configure it right and follow their recommendations," he says, "it's one of the few NAS appliances that have true five-nines."
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