Analyst house DCIG has produced a list of the biggest market movers and shakers in the world of high-end arrays, yet it doesn’t include IBM or HPE branded products, although they were evaluated. HPE OEMs a Hitachi Vantara VSP array that did make the cut, however.
The 2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays report evaluated arrays from Dell, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Infinidat, NetApp, Pure Storage and StorONE, and identifies the five top suppliers. It says: “An effective high-end storage solution provides consistent high performance and continuous availability for critical business workloads. To obtain this result, high-end storage must provide sufficient performance resources, storage capacity, and protocol support to serve the needs of these applications.”
The report’s author and analyst Ken Clipperton writes: “The DCIG TOP 5 High-end Storage Arrays generally feature more performance resources than other arrays, from CPU cores to DRAM caches and storage network connectivity. These performance resources provide the foundation for consolidating many workloads onto the array. All five arrays, except the InfiniBox, support 12 or more controllers. The InfiniBox has a unique three-controller architecture that also supports non-disruptive workload migrations among InfiniBox storage arrays.”
The alphabetically listed top 5 suppliers and products include: Dell PowerMax 8500/2500, Hitachi Vantara VSP 5000, Huawei OceanStor Dorado V6, Infinidat InfiniBox and NetApp AFF A900. Enter Infinidat, bye bye IBM.
All of these “offer unified storage through Fibre Channel and iSCSI block protocol support as well as NFS and SMB file access. Several also offer mainframe connectivity through FICON protocol support. Among the more recent developments, four provide S3 object storage. The combination of these capabilities means that storage for nearly any application can be supplied by, and consolidated onto, these high-end storage arrays.”
The evaluated arrays outside the top five were HPE’s Alletra 9000, Primera 670 and XP8 Gen 2, IBM’s DS8900F but not the FlashSysytem, Pure Storage FlashArray//XL and the StorONE Enterprise Platform. VAST Data, since it does not offer a block access protocol, did not meet this element of the inclusion criteria.
The previous DCIG 2020-2021 DCIG TOP 5 High-End Storage Arrays report had the following vendors: Dell EMC PowerMax 8000, Hitachi Vantara VSP 5000, Huawei OceanStor Dorado V6, IBM FlashSystem 9000, and NetApp AFF A4000/FAS8700.
You can download a copy of the 14-page 2023-2024 report here.
