IDEAS Storage Top 10

Have you ever wondered what the hot products are at any given time, in terms of public interest? Late last year, as part of the revamp of our public website, we added two new free information sources, the Server Gateway and Storage Gateway, to complement our existing Green Gateway and Benchmark Gateway services. The IDEAS Server and Storage Gateways cover all of the current products from the major server and storage vendors. Individual profile pages provide details on each product, with approximately 1,300 separate profiles currently spanning the two gateways. These new gateways allow us to monitor public usage of the profile pages, giving us an indication of what the most popular products are at any given time.

The table below lists the top 10 profiles from our Storage Gateway in order (from positions 1 through 10), based on profile page views for the month of December 2010. These results provide insight into which products have the highest public interest at the moment.

1. NetApp – FAS3240 System
2. NetApp – FAS3210 System
3. Oracle – Sun ZFS Storage 7120 Appliance
4. NetApp – FAS2040 System
5. NetApp – FAS3270 System
6. EMC – Connectrix DS-300B SAN Switch
7. IBM – EXN3000 SAS/SATA Expansion Unit
8. IBM – Storwize V7000 Disk Array
9. Dell – PowerVault MD3200i
10. Dell – PowerVault 124T LTO-4 120 Autoloader

(Note: IDEAS has separate, more advanced subscription-based offerings in Competitive Profiles and IDEAS Advantage. Usage of these subscription services is not included in this analysis, which is restricted to usage of the free public Gateways.)

As this list reflects just the first month of usage on the Storage Gateway, readers should be careful not to read too much into the outcomes. IDEAS expects that from month to month the list might change as new products are announced and people seek information on them. For example, the fact that NetApp FAS systems hold four out of the top five positions could reflect the relative newness of these FAS arrays, and thus the market’s interest to learn more about them. It will be interesting to see if the January 2011 figures, which will include coverage of EMC’s new products, will change substantially as a result of market developments.

We suspect that the trending outlook, rather than any single point-in-time Top 10 table, may be a more meaningful indicator. It is possible that some key existing popular products will feature each month, while other newer products may be more transient, featuring strongly around release time and then tapering off over time.

Once we have a few months of usage data under our belt, we will be better able to perform meaningful analysis of possible trends. In the meantime, we provide the above table as food for thought and encourage you to perform your own analysis.

We are interested in your feedback by posting a comment – both your thoughts on the table outcomes above and the IDEAS Storage (and Server) Top Ten concept in general. Look out for the IDEAS Server Top 10 soon in a future story.

The Storage and Server Gateways are free services from IDEAS and represent just a small subset of the IDEAS premium subscription offerings, IDEAS Advantage (for IT Buyers) and Competitive Profiles (for IT Sellers), which contain much more details and tools.