Best data storage products 2014: Products of the Year
Editor's note
For the 12th year in a row, we invited vendors and users to nominate their best data storage offerings for the annual Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com Products of the Year awards. Our awards differ from similar contests because we only focus on products that were introduced or significantly upgraded within the past year. As a result, new or lesser-known data storage products often fare well against entrenched products if those products were not appreciably upgraded.
But technological innovation isn't the only consideration -- the product also has to work well and satisfy user needs. Additional criteria our judges consider include performance, ease of integration, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value. Our judging panel comprises users, analysts and consultants, as well as Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com editors and writers.
As in previous years, categories included backup and disaster recovery software and services, backup hardware, storage management tools and storage system software. For the first time, we separated the storage systems category into all-flash systems and disk/hybrid systems to reflect the changing landscape of storage hardware available today.
To the 19 Products of the Year winners profiled on the following pages, we tender our hearty congratulations. To learn why each offering was among our selections for the best data storage products of 2014, click on the links in each section. We've also included links to the finalists so you can read about all the contenders in each category.
1Backup hardware
The backup hardware category in the 2014 Products of the Year awards evaluates tape libraries and drives, backup media, disk backup targets, virtual tape libraries, deduplication devices and gateway appliances for cloud backup. This year's vendor offerings include technologies aimed at improving dedupe performance.
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GOLD: Hewlett-Packard StoreOnce 6500
Hewlett-Packard's StoreOnce 6500 backup device uses federated deduplication to consolidate backup in remote sites. It offers one-to-many and cascaded disaster recovery configurations to protect data. Backups are managed from a central location. Read Now
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SILVER: Quantum DXi6900 Deduplication Appliance
Quantum Corp.'s purpose-built backup appliance works with all major backup software. iLayer software makes multi-site data protection easier, with setup configuration wizards, detailed resource utilization reporting and an intuitive topology-based view of the environment. Read Now
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BRONZE: Dell DR6000
The Dell DR6000 Backup Disk Appliance accelerates the data ingest rate for environments running hundreds of Windows and Linux client in a single environment. An integrated console can manage and monitor up to 64 DR appliances within an Active Directory. Read Now
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2014 Backup Hardware finalists
Many of the 10 finalists in this category are primed for the cloud, virtual environments and on-premises storage. Read Now
2Storage management tools
The storage management tools category includes products that provide performance monitoring, configuration management, provisioning, data reduction and other general storage management capabilities. There were nine entries in the category this year, and judges scored the top three highly for their ease of use and manageability, performance and innovation. The winners in this category were all significant upgrades of existing software products that expanded their support and added useful management features.
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GOLD: VMTurbo Operations Manager 4.7
VMTurbo Operations Manager uses collected infrastructure metrics, workload requirements and user-defined constraints to make recommendations regarding workload placement and resource configurations and then automates the actions. Read Now
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SILVER: Hewlett-Packard OneView for VMware vCenter 7.4.2
HP OneView integrates the manageability features of HP OneView, HP ProLiant servers, HP BladeSystem, HP Networking and HP Storage into the VMware vCenter console. Users can provision, monitor, update and scale resources without leaving the vCenter console. Read Now
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2014 Storage Management Tools finalists
The majority of the nine finalists are upgrades to existing products, but there are a few relative newcomers included. Read Now
3Storage system software
Virtualization and software-defined storage were big themes among the four winners of this year's storage system software category. The category includes file systems, volume management, storage virtualization, security software, storage optimization, solid-state caching, cloud storage, software-defined storage and object storage.
The gold medalist pools server flash and RAM, while the silver winner can aggregate SAN, NAS, DAS and other storage resources to provide virtual volumes to applications. There are two bronze co-winners: one pools the capacity of hard disks and flash drives in commodity servers into a distributed object store for virtual machines (VMs), while the other supports interfaces for file, object and VM storage.
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GOLD: PernixData Inc. FVP version 2.0
Version 2.0 of PernixData FVP can accelerate the performance of file and block storage and VMs through the pooling of server-based flash and RAM. Read Now
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SILVER: Atlantis Computing Inc. USX 2.0
Atlantis USX 2.0 software-defined storage adds support for VMware's Virtual Volumes and "teleport" capabilities so users can move VMs among storage systems, data centers and the cloud. Read Now
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BRONZE (tie): Scality Ring 5.0
Scality's Ring 5.0 software-defined storage features new VM storage capabilities, improved performance, enhanced automation, a redesigned GUI and OpenStack Cinder block storage support. Read Now
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BRONZE (tie): VMware Inc. Virtual SAN 5.5
VMware's Virtual SAN supplies shared storage for virtual machines via the pooling of disk and flash capacity from clustered ESXi hosts. Features include read/write caching and policy-based management. Read Now
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2014 Storage System Software finalists
Among the 11 finalists in this category, the description "software-defined storage" reigned supreme. Read Now
4Storage systems: All-flash systems
Flash has emerged in enterprise storage arrays to the point where nearly every vendor has an all-flash version and most SAN purchases included some flash. This year, for the first time, we created a Storage Systems: All-Flash Systems category for the Products of the Year competition. The winners include a legacy vendor that tailored its system for all-flash, a vendor that was an all-flash pioneer as a start-up and a company honored for its innovative solid-state drive (SSD) technology.
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GOLD: Hewlett-Packard 3PAR StoreServ 7450
Hewlett-Packard incorporated 3PAR thin technologies and the use of commercial multi-level cell flash drives into its 3PAR StoreServ 7450 all-flash storage system that can rival hard disk drive arrays on cost. Read Now
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SILVER: Pure Storage FlashArray 450
The FA-450 is Pure Storage's highest capacity model. It includes FlashProtect to aid against flash failure, FlashReduce high-performance inline data reduction, FlashRecover data-reduction-optimized backup and DR, and Forever Flash to extend array lifecycles. Read Now
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BRONZE: Samsung SSD 845DC PRO 3D NAND
Samsung is honored for being the first 3D NAND SSD that makes it possible to get more capacity and better performance on a drive. A Dynamic Thermal Guard feature automatically protects data from extreme heat or cold. Read Now
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2014 All-Flash Storage Systems finalists
The majority of the nine finalists in this category have a custom-built flash array. Read Now
5Storage systems: Disk and hybrid systems
Not all storage systems are all-flash these days. The winners in this category use either hard drives and flash in a hybrid configuration or no flash at all. The products on our final list include two hyper-converged systems -- one for Windows-only -- and an iSCSI array that added flash capability.
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GOLD: Scale Computing HC4000
Scale Computing proves you don't need flash or VMware support with the latest version of its hyper-converged storage product, which includes non-disruptive upgrades and virtual machine-level snapshots. Read Now
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SILVER: Gridstore HyperConverged Appliance
Gridstore takes its Windows-only storage system to the next level with its HyperConverged Appliance that combines servers and Microsoft Hyper-V-based storage nodes in one box. The Gridstore vController provides tight integration with Windows management and functionality. Read Now
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BRONZE: Nimble Storage Inc. CS700
Nimble's new midrange iSCSI hybrid system is the vendor's largest capacity array, and can get a big boost from the new All-Flash Shelf. The vendor's Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout architecture claims to decouple performance from spindle speed. Read Now
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2014 Hard Disk/Hybrid Storage Systems finalists
These six finalists still kick it old school with traditional spinning disk. Read Now