Showing posts with label storage virtualization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label storage virtualization. Show all posts

Friday, January 15, 2010

InfoStor welcomes new bloggers

January 15, 2010 – We recently added a couple of analysts/consultants to our blogger lineup: IT Brand Pulse’s Frank Berry and the Taneja Group’s Jeff Boles.

Frank is the CEO and a senior analyst at IT Brand Pulse, which conducts product reviews, surveys IT professionals on an ongoing basis and produces reports, including the IT Brand Leadership series. For my comments on one of IT Brand Pulse’s recent Brand Leadership survey results, see “Who are the (perceived) leaders in storage virtualization?"

Previously, Frank held senior executive positions with vendors such as QLogic and Quantum.

In his first post for InfoStor, he comments on storage virtualization, outlining the three phases, or eras, of the technology. See “EMC: Storage Virtualization Leader.”

Our other new blogger, Jeff Boles, is a senior analyst with the Taneja Group research and consulting firm. In his first post for infostor.com, Jeff takes a look at storage in 2010, touching on topics such as volume virtualization in enterprise arrays, WAN optimization, data deduplication, SSDs and, of course, the cloud. See “Storage for 2010 – Integration Innovation.”

Jeff also blogs on the Taneja Group site. Other Taneja Group analysts will occasionally share his blog spot.

The next addition to InfoStor’s Bits & Bytes blog will be a user/VAR blog, where IT storage professionals and channel professionals will share their opinions, insights and success stories. If you’re interested in occasionally participating, shoot me an email – daves@pennwell.com.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Who are the (perceived) leaders in storage virtualization?

December 21, 2009 – IT Brand Pulse recently surveyed 146 IT professionals, asking them which vendors they perceived as leaders in storage virtualization. In addition to the overall leader, other categories included price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation.

IT Brand Pulse gave the survey participants 12 vendor choices in each category: 3PAR, DataCore, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hitachi, HP, IBM, LSI, NetApp, Symantec and VMware.

And the winners are . . .

EMC took top honors as the perceived leader in the overall storage virtualization market, and also took the top spot in the reliability and service/support categories, while placing second in the innovation and performance categories.

NetApp took the top spots in innovation and performance and, strangely enough, placed second in all other categories.

Not surprisingly, Dell was #1 in the price category and, surprisingly, was #3 in the market leader and performance categories.

VMware was #3 in price and innovation, while IBM placed third in reliability and service/support.

The other seven vendors each got less than 10% of the vote in all of the categories.

Here are the win, place, show vendors in each category, with the percentage of end-user votes they received.

Market leader: EMC (26%), NetApp (19.9%), Dell (12.3%)
Price: Dell (27.4%), NetApp (22.6%), VMware (17.1%)
Performance: NetApp (24.7%), EMC (21.2%), Dell (11%)
Reliability: EMC (28.1%), NetApp (15.8%), IBM (12.3%)
Service and support: EMC (28.8%), NetApp (19.9%), IBM (11.6%)
Innovation: NetApp (25.3%), EMC (21.9%), VMware (11%)

Frank Berry, IT Brand Pulse’s CEO and senior analyst – and infostor.com’s newest blogger – recently blogged about storage virtualization. I like his lead:

“They say humans recognize the smell of chili, but dogs can detect the smell of different spices in the chili. Similarly, humans recognize storage virtualization, but industry experts see clear distinctions between the different types of storage virtualization.”

Frank goes on to outline the first two phases of storage virtualization, and provides a glimpse into the emerging third phase (heterogeneous storage virtualization in the cloud). And he also gives his view on which vendor was first to market with storage virtualization. Hint: It was in 1970.

Read Frank’s blog here.