DCIG 2011 Enterprise Scale-out Storage Buyer's Guide Now Available

Today DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of a new DCIG Buyer's Guide, the DCIG 2011 Enterprise Scale-out Storage Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks twenty (20) different enterprise scale-out solutions from ten (10) different storage providers. This Buyer's Guide gives small, medium and large enterprises the resources they need to assist them in making what is typically a very arduous and time-consuming decision: selecting an enterprise scale-out storage solution that meets their escalating archival, backup and unstructured storage requirements.

In 2010 the total amount of information generated zoomed over 1 zettabyte for the first time in the history of mankind driven in large part by growing archival, backup and unstructured data stores. This is creating unprecedented challenges for both small and large organizations as they must identify new solutions to deal with the practical ramifications of managing and storing all of this data.
 
It is this need that enterprise scale-out storage systems are particularly well suited to meet. Organizations that are strongly positioned to benefit from these solutions include:
 

• Small and midsize businesses looking for a solution to store their daily backups
• Cloud providers looking to economically, efficiently and securely scale out their storage to meet the needs of for their clients
• Cities that have implemented video surveillance and need some where to store it
• Financial, medical, oil and gas and telecommunication companies that capture volumes of information on items such as patients, transactions and geo-spatial data

The list of applications that can benefit from enterprise scale-out storage systems is long and diverse. However, the list of features that these systems need to provide to satisfy requirements is equally lengthy. This can make sorting through the list of available models, understanding what features are important and selecting the right solution a daunting and complex task.
 
To assist organizations in making this decision is what the DCIG 2011 Enterprise Scale-out Storage Buyer's Guide is intended to do. This Buyer's Guide covers enterprise scale-out storage systems that can scale from a few hundred gigabytes to tens of petabytes.

This DCIG 2011 Enterprise Scale-Out Storage Buyer's Guide achieves the following objectives:

• Provides an objective, third-party evaluation of currently available enterprise scale-out storage solutions
• Evaluates, scores and ranks enterprise scale-out storage solutions from the end-user's perspective
• Includes recommendations on how to best utilize this Buyer's Guide
• Provides data sheets on twenty (20) enterprise scale-out storage solutions from ten (10) different providers so organizations can do a quick comparison of features while having sufficient detail at their fingertips to make an informed decision
• Provides insight into the management, application layer, host support, hardware and product support features which organizations may look for in an enterprise scale-out storage solution
• Provides a summary of common configurations of enterprise scale-out storage solutions

Some key findings that come out of doing the research associated with preparing this report included:

• 90% of the solutions scaled to at least 1 PB of storage
• 80% of the solutions supported 10 Gb Ethernet interfaces
• 75% of the solutions supported the iSCSI networking protocol
• 55% of the solutions scaled to over 100 controller or storage nodes
• 20% of the solutions scaled to over 10 PB of storage capacity

The DCIG 2011 Enterprise Scale-out Storage Buyer's Guide is available immediately and may be downloaded for no charge with registration at the following link.

Note: The above links in this blog entry to the download site were updated on Dec 8, 2011.