IT Pros Choose 2016 Flash Storage/NVMe Brand Leaders – IT Brand Pulse

IT Brand Pulse, a source for research, data and analysis about data center infrastructure, day announced the results of the recent IT brand leader survey covering Flash Storage/NVMe products.

IT Pros from around the world responded to the independent,
non-sponsored survey in June 2016 asking which vendors
they perceive to be leaders in these fifteen categories:

• All Flash Converged System
• All Flash Unified SAN/NAS Array
• All Flash NVMe Fabric Attached Array
• All Flash FC Array
• Flash Cache Software
• NVMe Network Adapters
• All Flash Hyperconverged System
• Hybrid HDD/SSD Array
• All Flash NVMe PCIe Cards
• All Flash iSCSI Array
• NVDIMM
• Contributions to NVMe Technology (2012-2016)
• All Flash NAS Array
• NVMe SSD Modules
• Innovative New enterprise NVM Product

                                                                  
  Click to enlarge

“The flash industry is at the threshold of a new era where NVMe is the protocol of choice for internal and external storage,” said Frank Berry, CEO and senior analyst, IT Brand Pulse.  “This round of surveys reveals which vendors are establishing incumbent brand leadership for NVMe SSDs, PCIe cards and all flash arrays.”

Survey Highlights

Samsung Electronics

Contributions to NVMe Technology (2012-2016)
In the 2016 Flash Storage/NVMe annual survey, two special achievement questions were presented. For the first one, “Who contributed most to innovation in NVMe technology over the past five years?” respondents selected Samsung over second-place Intel. EMC, WD/SanDisk, a Western Digital brand, and Micron filled in the remaining lineup, as listed.

NVMe SSD Modules
Samsung had a strong showing in this newly added survey category, taking Market, Performance, Reliability, and Innovation leadership but giving up Price and Service & Support to SanDisk (the number two market leader according to the survey), with Intel next in line.

“Samsung Electronics is honored that the user community recognizes us as the best innovator in NVMe SSDs over the last five years, and for our market leadership in NVMe SSD products,” said Jim Elliott, corporate VP, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. “This is especially gratifying because Samsung has been selected by IT pros who are actually building next generation private and public cloud data centers.”

Intel

Innovative New enterprise NVM Product
Voters decided on Intel’s DIMMs based on 3D XPoint technology as the Most Innovative NVM Product, in the second of the two achievement awards for 2016. The others in the running were Samsung (2nd), EMC (3rd), and Nutanix (4th).

“Bigger memory and faster storage will benefit many new devices and also bring tremendous value to the cloud as businesses need to efficiently analyze growing amounts of data. Future products based on 3D XPoint technology will revolutionize any device, application or service that benefit from fast access to large sets of data,” said Donald D. Parker, VP and GM of Intel’s data center application engineering.

SanDisk

All Flash NVMe PCIe Cards
With the category this year including NVMe, SanDisk – for the fifth time (counting awards for Fusion-io, which was acquired by SanDisk) – captured Market, Performance, and Innovation titles, along with Price (3rd year) and Service & Support (2nd year). Intel came in the runner-up market leader, before EMC.

Flash Cache Software
SanDisk was the voters’ choice again with a sweep of all six of the awards: Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation. This marks the third year as market leader, finishing ahead of EMC and VMware, respectively.

“Explosive growth in the generation and storage of data is placing new challenges on IT departments across a wide array of industries, which must rethink the way they manage and monetize data both day-to-day as well as long-term,” said Anand Jayapalan, VP of SanDisk client and enterprise compute solutions marketing at Western Digital. “We understand this paradigm shift and continue to deliver an unmatched portfolio – spanning HDDs, SSDs and flash-based enterprise software solutions – to enable our customers to adapt to their changing data center needs as well as realize significant economic and performance benefits.”

NetApp

All Flash NAS Array
For the third straight time, NetApp scored Market, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation, as well as replayed 2015’s Price Leader (though ended up in a tie with second-place all-around EMC for Service & Support this year). Dell Storage followed in the number three market leader slot.

All Flash Unified SAN/NAS Array
In another repeat accomplishment, NetApp was named 2016 Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation leader. As in the NAS category, EMC secured the second market leader post. HPE was third.

“To capture new revenue opportunities, today’s businesses must move with speed and scale while balancing cost and risk,” said Brian Bakstran, acting CMO, NetApp. “With new high capacity drives and improved pricing, flash technologies are changing the expectations and economics of enterprise IT. NetApp offers the industry’s broadest all flash portfolio, allowing customers to move toward an all flash data center simply, affordably and without risk.”

HPE

All Flash Converged System
HPE led the market leader path again by beating out VCE (2nd) and IBM (3rd) and duplicating 2015 results, winning Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation.

“HPE is excited to be recognized again by IT professionals around the world for our innovative technology portfolio and our ability to solve business problems for our customers,” said Paul Miller, VP marketing, converged data center infrastructure, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Our hyperconverged solutions allow customers to deploy at cloud like speed, while simplifying their IT operations on their journey towards a composable infrastructure. And as our customers’ needs change, we are committed to evolve our hyperconverged and composable offerings to meet the needs of their marketplace.”

Dell Storage

All Flash iSCSI Array
Dell Storage, for the third year in a row, swept all leadership in this category:  Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation, with Pure Storage and EMC coming in second and third for market leader.

“Dell Storage has been recognized once again by customers as the overall market leader for All-Flash iSCSI arrays, a testament to our ability to offer organizations world class storage solutions that continue to lead the way for innovation, price, performance, reliability and support,” said Travis Vigil, executive director, Dell storage. “Dell storage continues to focus on redefining the economics of enterprise storage and is unmatched on price for performance, noted by IT leaders as the overall price leader for both FC and iSCSI all-flash arrays.”

Mellanox

NVMe Network Adapters
The inclusion of NVMe into the 2016 Flash Storage surveys produced the first winner for this category, Mellanox, who walked away with all available leader titles (Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation). QLogic was designated as the number two market leader, leaving Broadcom in third.

“Mellanox is pleased to be recognized by major customers and key IT personnel for the leadership and innovation of our NVMe network adapters,” said John Kim, director of storage marketing, Mellanox Technologies. “Our efforts with NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMf) will dramatically improve the performance of existing storage network applications. This, in turn, will accelerate the adoption of many new and future storage technologies such as scale-out and software-defined storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, and compute/storage disaggregation.“

Micron

NVDIMM
In another new category for these surveys, Micron made a strong showing by sweeping NVDIMM’s entire leadership: Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation, staying in front of Diablo Technologies and Viking Technology, who rounded out the second and third market leader spots.

“Micron’s persistent memory solutions give system architects a new approach for designing systems with better performance, reduced energy usage and improved TCO,” said Gordon Patrick, director of enterprise computing memory, Micron. “Our NVDIMMs offer a powerful solution that is available today, but we’re also leading the way on future persistent memory development by spearheading R&D efforts on promising new technologies.”

EMC

Hybrid HDD/SSD Array
EMC became 2016 Market Leader for the fourth time, according to the results, and repeated as Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation leader.  HPE was second for the market award, with IBM and NetApp tying for third. Dell Storage topped the Price Leader chart. 

All Flash FC Array
For the second year, EMC held on to the market leader position it lost in 2014. In addition to again being recognized as Service & Support leader, IT professionals gave EMC a few more honors this time: Performance, Reliability, and Innovation. Market leader runners-up were Pure Storage and IBM, in that order. Dell Storage interrupted the clean sweep and took Price Leader.

2016 Market Leader All Flash FC Array

All Flash NVMe Fabric Attached Array
In another new category inserted into this year’s survey, EMC’s DSSD overwhelmingly emerged with the 2016 market leadership (garnering over 75% of end user voting), Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation. Mangstor and E8 Storage were second and third across the board, accordingly.

Nutanix

All Flash Hyperconverged System
IT pro respondents split up the votes in this product category with Nutanix pulling out second consecutive Market and Innovation honors, as well as Price. Cisco (number two for Market Leader, ahead of HPE) received Performance and Service & Support, while VCE picked up Reliability.

Global IT Pro respondents to recent surveys include:  
AAA – ABC – American Airlines – American Express – AT&T – Bank of America – Barnes & Noble – BC Liquor Distribution Branch – Becton Dickinson – Bhabha Atomic Research Ctr – Blue Cross-Blue Shield (BCBSA) – Boeing – Boston Scientific – Caltech – Caterpillar – Chanel – Citigroup – City of L.A. –  ComEd – Cox Communications – C.R. BARD – Daybreak Game Co. (Sony Online Entertainment) – Delta Airlines – Detroit Medical Ctr – Deutsche Welle – Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation – Eletrobras – ExxonMobil – FAA – FedEx – Ford Motor Co. – GE – General Dynamics – General Motors –  HCL – HSN – Huntington Bank – Intuitive Surgical – ITG – Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab – JP Morgan – LafargeHolcim – Lockheed Martin – Lowe’s – LRZ – Macys – MIT – Morgan Stanley – NASA – Nationwide – NYC Transportation – Northrop Grumman – Oppenheimer – Optum – Pacific Northwest National Lab – PepsiCo – Perrigo – Prudential – Ricoh – SAIC – Shell – Siemens – Stanford University – Staples – Surescripts – TJX – T-Mobile – Torchmark – Transamerica – UBS – UPS – UNFCU – United Airlines – Universal Parks & Resorts – USC – U.S. Air Force – U.S. Census – Verizon – Walmart – Weizmann Institute of Science – Yale New Haven Health.