Top Unified Utility Storage Arrays – DCIG

DCIG, LLC announced the availability of its 2016-17 Unified Utility Storage Array Buyer’s Guide Edition.

This guide, one of six Utility Storage Array Buyer’s Guide Editions produced by DCIG, reviews and ranks 29 unified utility storage arrays from eight providers.

It provides much of the information that organizations need to make an informed decision about unified utility storage arrays that are intended for use in enterprise environments. These arrays are highly available, support both block and file protocols, scale to at least 75TBs and are available for less than $1,000/TB.

This plethora of vendors and products in the enterprise utility storage array marketplace – combined with a lack of readily available comparative data – can make product research and selection a daunting task. DCIG creates buyer’s guides in order to help end users accelerate their product research and selection process. These guides help to drive cost, time, and effort out of the research process while simultaneously increasing confidence in the results.

DCIG has invested many hours in designing a survey to capture data that matters most to prospective purchasers of utility storage arrays. It then gathers the relevant data and analyzes the final results. The resulting data is categorized, standardized and distilled into summary ranking tables as well as a one-page data sheet for each array. This combination of summary data and data sheets make it easy to do quick, side-by-side comparisons of utility storage arrays so organizations may quickly arrive at a short list of products that may meet their requirements.

DCIG characterizes utility storage arrays as arrays that are:

• Have a street price of less than $1,000/TB ($1/GB)
• Highly available configuration (two or more controllers)
• Scale to at least 75TBs of raw storage capacity

The utility storage arrays highlighted in this specific edition support both block (FC and/or iSCSI) and file (CIFS and/or NFS) storage networking protocols. These arrays offer organizations the hardware redundancy they expect along with data protection features like snapshots and replication capabilities. Although there is no official maximum on storage capacity for unified utility arrays included in this edition, those products included generally scale to about one petabyte.

The top products (ranked as either Recommended or Excellent) in this 2016-17 Unified Utility Storage Array Buyer’s Guide Edition include (in alphabetical order):

• EMC VNX7600
• Fujitsu Limited Eternus DX100 S3, DX200 S3, DX500 S3 and DX600 S3 models
• HDS VSP G400 and G600 models
• IXsytems TrueNAS Z35
• Nexsan UNITY6000

Unified Utility Storage Array Overall Rankings
(products listed alphabetically in each category)

These top ranking unified utility storage arrays evaluated shared many comparable features in terms of their high levels of total raw storage capacity, flexibility in supporting multiple block and file protocols and ease of use.

The Nexsan UNTIY6000 specifically stood out as it from all other unified utility storage arrays with its enterprise file sync-and-share feature known as Enterprise n-Way Sync.

This feature enables organizations to keep data stored in a folder that is synchronized across any number of UNITY systems. The UNITY systems may be connected by LAN or WAN with all data encrypted as it is transmitted. This provides organizations a secure, reliable means to store and share data in multiple locations without the need to use a public cloud storage application such as Dropbox.