DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide Now Available

DCIG is very excited to today announce the availability of a comprehensive Midrange Array Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 70 midrange arrays from more than 20 different storage providers. But the reason that DCIG believes users will find this guide so helpful is that it was written and prepared from a user's perspective while fully disclosing what factors it did and did not take into consideration when arriving at its weightings.

The 2010 DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide is a first in an important way. To the best of DCIG's knowledge, it is the first time any analyst firm had attempted to quantify on an individual basis what features are available on each midrange array, how these features should be scored and weighted and then ranked and published the results.

Those of you are familiar with my work will recognize that this Buyer's Guide goes well beyond the technology reports that I used to produce during the six years that I wrote for Storage magazine and the time since then that DCIG has run and operated its own data storage focused analyst firm and website that has offered some competitive analysis.

During that time, I have contemplated how DCIG could produce a report that is valuable to end users in helping them make a buying decision as well as to storage providers so they have objective source of competitive analysis. To accomplish that, I leveraged my combined prior experiences in writing for Storage magazine and my work experiences at First Data. 

This Midrange Array Buyer's Guide is the outcome of those efforts as it eliminates a major headache for users by alleviating one of the most time consuming components of their midrange array buying decision - the information gathering and evaluation stage.

Using the Midrange Array Buyer's Guide, users can quickly come up with a list of multiple midrange array models that meet their specific needs. They now have access to a guide from an objective third party that lists what features each midrange array model does and does not support and scores and ranks them according to what features users view as important.Using it, they can make a decision as to which ones they want to test or even take the next step and get bids on competitive models.

In the process of preparing this guide, DCIG found that across the spectrum of midrange arrays covered in this Buyer's Guide, the following features were implemented and/or supported at or near 100% across all Midrange Arrays:
 

• Support for RAID Levels that were RAID 1, 5, 6 or some comparable equivalent
• Support for LUN Masking
• 24x7 phone support
• Email home support
• RoHS compliant

In terms of how this guide will help users, David Stevens, a senior storage administrator with a large northeastern university said this after reviewing the Buyer's Guide. "This will be very beneficial to all storage administrators who are trying to make a decision on what storage arrays to evaluate in their environment. The Buyer's Guide is very upfront about what it has and has not done in analyzing the different midrange array models and goes into fairly gory detail in terms of how it arrives at the scores, ratings and rankings for each midrange array model."

More information about obtaining a copy of this Midrange Array Buyer's Guide can be found here or by clicking on the Midrange Array Buyer's Guide logo on the right.

6/7/2010 Update: A free download of this Buyer's Guide is now available to qualified end-users at this site.