EMC Unseated HP as Market Brand Leader in Storage Virtualization

IT Brand Pulse, a source of data and
analysis about IT infrastructure, announced the results of the December
2012 Brand Leader
Survey.

Survey respondents were asked which vendors they perceive as the leader in eleven product categories: FCoE Switches, Converged Systems, Ethernet Adapters for HPCs, Storage Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Microservers, Blade Servers, Midrange Servers, Desktop Virtualization, Converged Network Adapters, and Blade Server Networking.

For each category, respondents chose the brand leader in Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation.

"Enterprise data centers are buying a growing%age of servers, storage and networking in the form of converged systems, while cloud data centers are deploying more microservers," said Frank Berry, CEO of IT Brand Pulse. "In these important new IT product categories, VCE and Dell are establishing brand leadership."

Highlights of the survey:

Cisco extended its product category brand dominance in the survey, emerging as the Market Leader in FCoE Switches  along with Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation titles for the fourth straight year. Brocade ranked second in market above third place QLogic.

"The accelerating adoption of cloud computing, fabric consolidation and virtualization is driving network convergence, with the FCoE protocol as a key element of the multi-protocol strategy," said Shashi Kiran, senior director, Data Center and Cloud Networking. "The benefits include simplified management, improved network flexibility, and more efficient resource utilization, all of which help to reduce costs."

For the first time since 2009, EMC unseated HP as the Market Leader in Storage Virtualization, as well as posting wins in the Performance, Reliability and Service & Support categories. End users chose Dell as the Price leader and VMware for Innovation. VMware was the second top vote getter in the Market leader category followed by NetApp.

VCE, the joint venture between EMC and Cisco, and pioneer in the new class of converged systems, ranked number one in Converged Systems in all categories, except Price, which went to HP. VCE and its Vblock Systems came out ahead of HP and IBM, respectively, for Market leader.

"VCE initiated the converged system movement, and our focus on purpose-built systems that standardize and optimize IT processes and operations has enabled many of the world’s largest enterprise and service provider customers to drive successful data center modernization initiatives," said Praveen Akkiraju, VCE CEO. "VCE is pleased to be recognized with this IT Brand Pulse award, and is especially proud to be named by our customers as leaders in Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation for Converged Systems."

IB leader Mellanox is establishing a brand beachhead in the Ethernet market. The company landed all the brand leader titles in Ethernet Adapters for HPCs (Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation). Across the board, Intel secured second place followed by Solarflare.

"We are delighted and honored to be recognized by IT professionals as the leader in the HPC Ethernet adapter market, including price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation," said Gilad Shainer, VP of market development at Mellanox Technologies, Inc. "Our 10 and 40GbE interconnect solutions are providing end users with critical features for today’s data center: RDMA, low-latency, CPU efficiency, high performance and high density, low power and low cost, which enable the best return-on-investment."

Emulex was once again selected by IT professionals as the Market Leader for Converged Network Adapters, four years in a row, and as the top brand in all but the Price category, which went to QLogic. Cisco finished behind Emulex, with QLogic coming in third for the Market award.

IT perceptions revealed HP as the multiple winner in this month’s survey by earning Market Leader titles in three categories:  Blade Servers,  Midrange Servers, and Blade Server Networking. For the third year in a row, HP led the way as Market, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation leader in Blade Servers. Dell finished second in the Market Leader spot for both Blades and Midrange Servers, and finished first in Price (Blades) and Performance (Midrange). While Cisco emerged as the runner-up Market Leader in Blade Server Networking, it did capture the Performance category.

In both the Server Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization surveys, VMware captured Market Leader awards and swept the top spots in all remaining categories (Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation). For the runner-up Market Leader positions, respondents chose Oracle for Server Virtualization and Citrix for Desktop Virtualization.
 
Voting in the Microservers survey showed Dell as the leader in Market, Price and Performance, but HP took the remaining three categories (Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation). HP finished behind Dell as the Market leader with Supermicro rounding out third.