February 2012 Storage Leaders by IT Brand Pulse

IT Brand Pulse, a source of data and analysis about IT infrastructure, announced the results of the February 2012 Brand Leader Awards survey.

In this survey, respondents were asked which vendors they perceive as the leader in four storage categories: NAS, FC Storage, Free Cloud Storage, and Deduplication. For each category, respondents chose the brand leader in Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation.

Highlights of the survey:

• Dropbox captured the Market Leader Award in the first annual Free Cloud Storage brand leader survey. Dropbox also placed second in four other categories. Google placed second in voting for Market Leader, but placed first in four other categories including Innovation Leader. Amazon was selected as the Service & Support Leader and placed third in four other categories.
• With 30% separating first and second place, EMC was again selected as the FC Storage Market Leader. A surprise in the 2012 survey was that NetApp placed second in voting for Market Leader, bringing HP down to third place. EMC also won 4 out of the 5 other categories, with Dell selected as the FC Storage Price Leader.
• EMC won five of six Deduplication brand leader categories including the Deduplication Market Leader award. Dell was chosen as the Deduplication Price Leader. HP and Quantum placed second and third in voting for Market Leader.
• NetApp, the company whose innovative ‘NAS Toasters’ helped it seize brand leadership from Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, won the 2012 NAS Market Leader award for the third consecutive year. NetApp won 4 out of the 5 other categories with Dell selected as the NAS Price Leader. EMC and HP placed second and third in voting for NAS Market Leader.