Best data storage products 2016: Products of the Year
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GOLD: Zerto Virtual Replication 4.5
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.5 protects multi-terabyte virtual machines with high change rates. It features the new Journal File Level Recovery, giving IT greater confidence in data restoration. Read Now
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SILVER: Veeam Availability Suite v9
Veeam Availability Suite v9 takes less than 10 minutes to install and delivers comprehensive visibility of backup infrastructure. The product includes Veeam Cloud Connect and a backup repository. Read Now
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BRONZE: Datos IO RecoverX
Datos IO RecoverX is built for scale and performance across multiple platforms and clouds, for next-generation applications. Its base is a non-media server dependent architecture. Read Now
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2016 Backup and DR software finalists
Learn about each of the 11 software products selected as finalists in the category. Read Now
Editor's note
This year marks the 15th edition of the Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com Products of the Year awards. That's 15 years of identifying the very best in data storage for our readers. As before, the Products of the Year competition began with an invitation to technology vendors to nominate their products for consideration. And, unlike other awards, we only recognize products introduced or significantly upgraded during the course of the previous year. This evens the playing field, giving new or lesser-known products and startups a fairer chance against more established brands and products.
Technological innovation is a significant factor for our judges when adjudicating the nominees, but it is by no means the only one. A product wouldn't do much to satisfy if it's hard to use and implement! So, in addition to technology, our judges graded on performance, manageability, how easily a product can be integrated and used, functionality and value. Our judging panel consisted of users, analysts and consultants, along with Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com writers and editors.
Nominated products competed in the following categories: all-flash storage systems, backup and disaster recovery software and services, backup hardware, hybrid flash storage systems, server-based storage and SAN management tools.
Of the many products nominated in these six categories, only 17 earned gold, silver or bronze awards to become Products of the Year winners. We would like to congratulate each of the 17 winners on a job well done.
Click on the links in each section below to learn more about why each of our winners made our list of best data storage products for 2016. You'll also find links to the finalists in each category. That way, you can read up on the nominees who gave our medalists the stiffest competition.
1Backup hardware
Products eligible for backup hardware products of the year include tape libraries and drives, backup media, disk backup targets, virtual tape libraries, deduplication devices, gateway appliances for cloud backup and replication solutions. Backup hardware has become a mature market so this year’s entries included a fair amount of software enhancements and upgrades.
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GOLD: Unitrends Recovery Series backup appliance Release 9.0
Unitrends added a flash tier to its Recovery Series backup appliance product line to speed performance, considered an advancement because most vendors find flash too costly for backup data. Read Now
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SILVER: Actifio Virtual Data Pipeline 7.0
Actifio's Virtual Data Pipeline copy data virtualization technology makes data distributed, location-independent and instantly accessible. It creates a single golden copy of a company's data store. Read Now
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BRONZE: Barracuda Backup
The latest version of Barracuda Backup offers cloud-to-cloud backup for Office 365 and an expanded Backup Export Tool to support Amazon Web Services for long-term retention. Read Now
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2016 Backup Hardware finalists
This year's seven data backup hardware finalists for Products of the Year feature built-in new software capabilities to improve backup and recovery and are becoming cloud-compatible. Read Now
2Storage and SAN management tools
Entrants for the storage and SAN management tools category for the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2016 Products of the Year award ranged from a complete data center management suite to a tool for checking on how the network component of your NAS system is performing at any given moment. All of the products fit into one of these areas that made them eligible for consideration: SRM and SAN management software, performance monitoring, configuration management, provisioning, or data reduction.
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GOLD: Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe
The VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe is a real-time performance monitoring tool for NFS traffic in a NAS system, similar to the types of real-time monitors currently used in Fibre Channel systems. Read Now
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SILVER: Data Dynamics Inc. StorageX 7.8
Data Dynamics Inc. StorageX 7.8 upgrades the company's award winner with new features designed to protect data both at rest and in the data migration process that is the product's hallmark. Read Now
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2016 Storage and SAN Management Tools finalists
The six finalists in the 2016 Products of the Year storage and SAN management tools category run the gamut from network probes to complete SAN control software. Read Now
3Server-based storage
VMware's Inc.'s feature-packed vSAN 6.2 product update captured the gold award in the server-based storage category.
Startup Formation Data Systems was runner-up with its innovative new FormationOne software-defined storage product. DataCore Software Corp.'s Hyper-converged Virtual SAN P2P5 update took the bronze award with high marks in functionality and performance.
Products eligible in the server-based storage category included hyper-converged appliances that combine storage, compute, networking and virtualization in one box; software-defined storage systems; software that pools and centrally manages storage capacity across servers; and storage services found in storage arrays. The storage software could be sold standalone or packaged with hardware. All of the winning products can run on commodity x86 server hardware.
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GOLD: VMware vSAN 6.2
VMware's vSAN 6.2 hyper-converged infrastructure software was a major update adding anticipated features such as deduplication/compression, RAID 5/RAID 6 erasure coding, and quality of service. Read Now
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SILVER: Formation Data Systems FormationOne
Formation Data Systems' software-defined storage tiers virtual volumes across SSDs/HDDs, supports block, file and object storage, and builds in data reduction, journaled data protection, and QoS. Read Now
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BRONZE: DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN P2P5 Update
DataCore's Hyper-converged Virtual SAN update boosted performance through optimizations to its bottleneck-reducing Parallel I/O software, an expanded high-speed cache and 32 Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs. Read Now
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2016 Server-Based Storage finalists
2016 Products of the Year finalists revealed for category encompassing hyper-converged appliances and software-defined storage that runs on commodity server hardware. Read Now
4Storage systems: All-flash systems
The winners in our all-flash storage systems category offer storage arrays that are available only with solid-state drives (SSDs) and no mechanical drives. Finalists include a newcomer to all-flash storage, a vendor product built on Western Digital PCIe NAND flash technology, and system designed to accept only proprietary flash module drives (FMDs) rather than generic flash media.
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GOLD: Nimble Storage AF-Series All Flash Array
Nimble claims AF-Series arrays provide 20% more useable capacity than competing all-flash arrays with RAID data protection and VM-level analytics. Read Now
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SILVER: Tegile Systems IntelliFlash HD
Tegile Systems IntelliFlash HD all-flash system packages performance-optimized flash with MLC flash caching and deduplication. Read Now
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BRONZE: Hitachi Data Systems Virtual Storage Platform VSP F800
Hitachi VSP F800 is the highest-capacity model of the VSP F all-flash array family, which support only the vendor's flash module drive device. Read Now
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2016 All-Flash Storage Systems finalists
Our seven all-flash storage system 2016 finalists include products from flash-only vendors, as well as vendors that offer all-flash versions of existing hybrid arrays. Read Now
5Storage systems: Disk and hybrid systems
The Hybrid/All-Disk Storage Systems category is for the best storage platforms available with a mixture of hard disk drives and flash storage. These products include FC and iSCSI SAN, NAS, multi-protocol systems, converged/hyper-converged infrastructure products, DAS, hard disk drives, disk controllers, caching appliances, storage virtualization appliances, cloud-integrated storage)
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GOLD: Zadara Storage Cloud
The Zadara Storage Cloud is an enterprise-grade storage cloud system where multiple tenants can run VPSA's file and block storage or ZIOS Object Storage on the same physical machines on-premises or in the cloud. Read Now
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SILVER: Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Arrays (CS Series)
The Nimble Adaptive Flash array combines a flash-optimized architecture with Predictive Analytics to give applications fast and reliable access to data. The CS Series is backed by the Nimble InfoSight analytics. Read Now
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BRONZE: Avere's Cloud-Core NAS (C2N)
Avere's Cloud-Core NAS (C2N) system provides a path to cloud in one system from a single vendor, uniting the familiarity of NAS with the efficiency of object storage. Read Now
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2016 Hard Disk/Hybrid Storage Systems finalists
The 11 finalists in the hard disk/hybrid storage systems category of the 2016 Products of the Year include cloud and arrays that don't demand all-flash drives. Read Now