EMC Unified Storage, Amazon S3 Cloud Backup, Symantec Backup Software, QLogic FC HBAs, Quantum Libraries

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

In this survey, respondents were asked which vendors they perceive as the leader in eight storage categories: FC HBA, FC Switch, Tape Library, Backup Software, Unified storage, Cloud Backup, HPC storage and IO Virtualization/PCI Sharing.

For each category, respondents chose the brand leader in market, price, performance, reliability, service & support, and innovation.

Cloud backup
The inaugural Cloud Backup brand leader survey, respondents chose Amazon S3 as the winner in five of six categories, including Market Leader and Innovation Leader. Carbonite took the Price Leader position, while placing second in four other categories. Dropbox, the Free Cloud storage brand leader last month, placed second in Innovation while placing third in the Market and Price Leader categories.
    
Backup software    
For the second consecutive year, IT Pros demonstrated strong brand preference for Backup Software from Symantec. In the March 2012 surveys, Symantec held a 38% margin above the closest contender in the Market Leader category and swept all six leader awards for the second year in a row. The survey revealed close competition for the second place slot between CommVault, with their Simpana software, and IBM, with their Tivoli Storage Manager. Both vendors placed second in three categories. EMC lost some ground with their NetWorker since 2011, forfeiting the second place slot in the Market Leader category to IBM.

"Symantec has long been trusted by customers of all shapes and sizes to address their data protection challenges," said Danny Milrad, director of product marketing, Symantec Information Management Group. "As data growth continues, our innovative approach to backup modernization will allow organizations to break the backup window with an integrated approach for physical and virtual backups, deduplication and snapshots, protecting data even as it continues to grow, removing complexities, and driving down costs. It is Symantec’s goal to help companies drive out 80 percent of their backup operating costs over the next three to five years."

IO virtualization/PCI sharing
In the first brand leader survey covering IO Virtualization/PCI Sharing, NextIO swept all six awards, including the Market Leader title, with a decisive 30% spread between first and second place. Xsigo placed second in every category, while Virtensys captured all third place positions.

"NextIO is pioneering networking and storage solutions for data centers adopting top-of-rack architectures," said Mike Heumann, SVP, WW Sales and Marketing. "The IT brand leader survey for IO Virtualization indicates that IT professionals are standing up and taking notice."
 
FC HBAs
For the third consecutive year, QLogic secured the Market Leader award for FC HBAs, along with leadership accolades in Price, Performance and Reliability. Brocade made its first appearance on the HBA brand leaderboard by winning awards for Service & Support and Innovation; overtaking QLogic in both categories.

"Following the November 2011 IT Brand Pulse Survey where QLogic captured both the Innovation and Price Leader categories for Converged Network Adapters, we are delighted to once again be recognized as the Market Leader in FC HBAs for the third straight year," said Chris Humphrey, VP of corporate marketing. "The IT Brand Pulse survey validates our history of providing innovative and reliable I/O solutions that deliver new levels of flexibility and performance, such as our new FlexSuite adapters that combine 16Gb FC and 10Gb Ethernet converged networking into a single-architecture design."
 
Tape libraries
Quantum three-peated by taking the Market Leader award for Tape Libraries once again in the March 2012 survey. Quantum also walked away with brand leader awards for Price and Innovation for the third year in a row. IBM replaced Quantum as the leader in Reliability and Service & Support while tying with Quantum as the Performance leader. IBM also overtook fading tape brand Oracle/STK for second place in the Market Leader category.

"Quantum has continued to build on our position as the #1 worldwide provider of tape automation, adding data availability, management and security enhancements," said Eric Bassier, director of Tape Products for Quantum. "Along with our award-winning DXi disk backup and deduplication appliances and vmPRO solutions for protecting virtual machine data, our tape libraries are also part of a comprehensive data protection portfolio that provides customers with a broad range of leading options for meeting their storage needs."

FC switch
For FC Switch, Brocade and Cisco each won two categories outright, and tied for leadership in two categories. Brocade emerged as the Market Leader and Price Leader, while matching Cisco for the top spots in Performance and Innovation. IT professionals chose Cisco as the FC switch Reliability and Service & Support leader.

Unified storage
Riding on the mega-launch of its VNX series, EMC was chosen as Market Leader for Unified storage for the second year in a row. EMC captured five of six categories with Dell winning the Price Leader award. A casualty of EMC’s popular new VNX series is NetApp. Despite pioneering Unified storage Systems, NetApp lost its title as Innovation leader to EMC. NetApp secured second place in every category.

HPC storage
EMC Isilon scored the Market Leader and Performance Leader titles for HPC storage, along with three of the four remaining brand leader awards. Dell was selected as the Price Leader, while Hitachi Data Systems placed second in the Market Leader category and took third in two other categories. NetApp tied EMC Isilon for Service & Support leadership, and held the runner-up position as Performance Leader.