Products of the Year 2010:

2010Product categories

SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine invited companies in the storage market to nominate their products for the 2010 Products of the Year awards. For previously available products, the upgrade must have incorporated major new features that were designed to meet new or evolving needs in the marketplace.

We looked at products in five categories:
  • Backup and disaster recovery software and services (backup, recovery, disaster recovery (DR), snapshot, replication, electronic vaulting and archivers)
  • Backup hardware (libraries, tape drives and backup media, disk backup targets, virtual tape libraries (VTLs) and deduplication devices)
  • Disks and disk subsystems (storage-area network (SAN), network-attached storage (NAS), direct-attached storage (DAS), hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state storage and disk controllers)
  • Storage management tools (storage resource management (SRM) and SAN management software, performance monitoring, file systems, volume management, virtualization software and security software)
  • Storage networking equipment (switches, host bus adapters (HBAs), network interface cards (NICs), virtualization appliances, security devices and caching appliances)
Products were judged by a panel of users, analysts, consultants, and Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com editors. Products were rated based on six criteria: innovation, performance, ease of integration into environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value. We then tallied each judge's ratings separately, and aggregated them with those of the other judges to come up with a numerical score for each product. The numerical scores coupled with empirical data from our panel of judges produced the winners.

View Products of the Year 2010 winners