Taneja Report on IceWEB

IceWEB, Inc. announced industry analyst firm Taneja Group, Inc. has published a report on IceWEB’s differentiation and superiority in unified data storage amidst a crowded market of traditional storage vendors.

Authored by Jeff Boles, Taneja Group senior analyst an director – Validation Services, the report underscores the industry’s movement toward unified storage systems, and portrays IceWEB as a standout vendor due in part to the company’s enterprise grade storage systems and IceSTORM Operating System.

A full reproduction of the report follows.

IceWEB: Nailing Unified Storage
IceWEB is a unified storage player that has been in the market for a number of years, with a big footprint in federal government. But the market is awash in new primary storage offerings, many of them focused on unified storage. NetApp obviously held the reigns for a long time, but a few representative recent contenders include Scale Computing, Nexsan’s E5000, Dell’s Fluid File System offerings, companies like Nimbus, and more. This newly-crowded market means that even established unified storage companies have to have concrete differentiators from their competitors, or they’ll lose out to more attractive new offerings.

IceWEB seems to have some clear differentiators including an enterprise-grade storage subsystem and a user interface that is more user-friendly than many we’ve seen. These two differentiators should help IceWEB to go further than competitors in delivering both infrastructure and operational efficiency.

The underlying storage subsystem seems to be built for enterprise-class primary use, and is architected for better workload isolation and more granular performance tiering (including across SSD) than many products in the market.

A highly polished interface that looks more sophisticated than a lot of the other stuff that has been coming to the market. At first glance an interface may not seem like a real thrill. But a highly useable interface is conducive to better user adoption and comfort, which in turn makes a unified storage offering even more attractive and marketable.

It seems like IceWEB has something to show off, and I’m personally looking forward to putting their product under the magnifying glass to see if the efficiency factors really surface. Perhaps we’ll see them in the Taneja Group Lab in the near future.

"Taneja Group’s publication on IceWEB today places the latest building block in the industry’s growing consensus of IceWEB’s value and differentiation in unified data storage," said Steven Toole, IceWEB’s CMO. "In the rapidly evolving information technology sector where yesterday’s leaders can quickly fall from grace, it’s independent industry experts such as Taneja Group who keenly spot the next rising stars on the horizon. Enterprise IT decision makers expecting more from storage vendors will look to this analyst expertise to guide their buying decisions."