2013 SSD Leaders – IT Brand Pulse

IT Brand Pulse, a source of data and analysis about IT infrastructure, announced the results of the recent 2013 SSD Brand Leader Survey, as voted by IT pros. 

Survey respondents were asked which vendors they perceive as the leader in eleven SSD product categories: All Flash SAN SSD Systems, All Flash NAS SSD Systems, All DRAM SAN SSD Systems, All Flash Unified SSD Systems, PCle SSD DAS Adapters, PCle SSD SAN Adapters, SAS/SATA SSD Modules, SSD DAS/SAN Cache, SSD NAS Cache Appliance, SSD Controller Chips, Hybrid HDD/SSD Systems. For each category, respondents chose the brand leader in Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation.

On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 at the Flash Memory Summit (Santa Clara Convention Center), IT Brand Pulse will honor the Innovation Leader winners in all eleven SSD categories. In addition, two special innovation awards, also chosen by IT professionals, will be presented: David Flynn, founder of Fusion-io, for Contributions to SSD Innovation, 2008-2013, and Facebook for Contributions to SSD Adoption, 2008-2013.  The awards ceremony takes center stage in the FMS Theatre (#701), Exhibitor Hall at 1 p.m.

"The results of the 2013 SSD surveys reflect the many acquisitions of start-ups by larger storage companies," said Frank Berry, CEO of IT Brand Pulse. "Of the hundreds of SSD start-ups, the only remaining pure-play SSD companies perceived as leaders by IT pros were Fusion-io and Nimbus."

 
For All DRAM SAN SSD Systems, IBM‘s recent acquisition of TMS secured itself as a repeat top choice for leadership titles in the six categories of Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation. Like last year, Kaminario was number two behind IBM/TMS in the Market Leader standings, followed by Kove.

"It’s an honor to be recognized by IT Brand Pulse as a solid state storage market leader for our innovation around flash solutions," said Michael Kuhn, VP and business line executive, IBM flash. "Solid state storage is changing the economics of the data center and IBM is committed to driving innovation that helps our clients realize the benefits."
 
Nimbus Data continued its dominance in both All Flash NAS SSD Systems and All Flash Unified SSD Systems. For the second year in a row, Nimbus Data swept all the categories: Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation. Rounding out second and third for the Market Leader award in All Flash NAS SSD Systems were Violin Memory and Skyera, respectively. For All Flash Unified SSD Systems, Skyera was the runner-up Market Leader, ahead of Whiptail.

"Nimbus Data is honored to win IT Brand Pulse’s Market Leader in Unified All-Flash Systems for the second straight year," stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder, Nimbus Data. "This non-sponsored recognition is further affirmation of Nimbus Data’s exceptional team and patent-pending solutions in the rapidly-growing all-flash industry. With over 450 deployments and 400% year-over-year growth, Nimbus Data continues to lead the charge by helping our customers realize the full performance, reliability, and economic benefits of an all-flash storage infrastructure."
 
For SSD NAS Cache Appliance, SSD DAS/SAN Cache and Hybrid HDD/SSD Systems, NetApp had a high-profile in this survey as the Market leader in all three of the product categories. Having added CacheIQ to its fold late last year, NetApp/CacheIQ swept SSD NAS Cache Appliance: Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation Leader. The runner-up leader across the board in this product category went to Violin Memory, followed by Alacritech. In the SSD DAS/SAN Cache survey, the leader votes for Performance, Reliability, and Innovation went to Fusion-io (IO Turbine), who also came in second in the Market category (EMC placed third). NetApp tied with SanDisk (FlashSoft) as the Price leader and EMC was the Service & Support leader.

For Hybrid HDD/SSD Systems, IT professionals repeated their selections from 2012: IBM (who finished second in Market) captured the Innovation award, EMC (third, Market) was the leader in Performance and Reliability and the Price award went to Dell.  NetApp took the Service and Support title for the first time.

"Flash is changing the speed at which business is conducted and we are honored that IT professionals have selected NetApp as a flash innovation and industry leader in the 2013 SSD Brand Leaders survey," said Mark Welke, senior director, platforms marketing, NetApp. "This recognition validates NetApp’s commitment to providing customers with the strongest and broadest enterprise flash portfolio today that allows them to maximize the value of flash across the entire IT stack. Our strategic framework is designed to provide maximum flexibility and choice to enable customers to address their specific needs and workloads."
 
LSI Corporation (SandForce) was also a two-time Market leader winner for SSD Controller Chips.  While IT perceptions showed LSI as a repeat leader in the Price and Innovation categories, they swept the awards by capturing the Performance, Reliability and Service & Support titles previously held by Intel, who came in second in every category.

"LSI is honored to have been recognized by IT professionals as the overall Market Leader for SSD Controller Chips – sweeping all six categories – in the latest IT Brand Pulse survey," said Thad Omura, VP marketing, flash components division, LSI. "The selection of LSI SandForce flash controllers is validation of our continued technology leadership and reflects our comprehensive solutions portfolio and unique ability to help customers rapidly gain the benefits of flash for their applications."
 
Voting in the PCIe SSD SAN Adapters category revealed QLogic as the Market Leader and leader in four of the five other leader choices in the 2013 SSD Brand Survey. QLogic posted wins in the Price, Performance, Reliability, and Innovation categories, giving up only the Service & Support crown to EMC, who IT pros ranked second in Market above third place, Virident.

"Having IT end users select FabricCache as the Market Leader for Price, Performance, Reliability, and Innovation confirms that the industry’s first caching SAN adapter squarely addresses IT needs for performance acceleration of mission-critical, virtualized and clustered applications that rely on shared SAN storage," said Chris Humphrey, VP corporate marketing, QLogic. "By combining our market-leading FC adapter and proven FC driver with intelligent caching and high-performance PCIe flash, QLogic customers get a dramatically simpler, cost-efficient and powerful enterprise-ready application acceleration solution that is easy to deploy, non-disruptive and familiar to operate and manage."
 
In the SAS/SATA SSD Modules survey, brand leadership split four ways with Seagate coming in as Market Leader (and tying with Intel for Service & Support). Intel, the second place finisher for Market Leader, captured the Reliability title while the Performance and Innovation categories went to Samsung (who finished third in Market). Western Digital rounded out the leader list as the Price champion.

"We are pleased to be recognized by IT Brand Pulse as a brand leader in the SSD SATA/ SAS space. It is a true honor to be recognized as a market frontrunner, by industry peers and IT professionals, particularly at this time in the Seagate’s history as it comes on the heels of the recent release of our new family of SSD products," said Scott Horn, Seagate VP marketing. "We look forward to continuing down this path and releasing innovative, new, cutting-edge SSD products in the near future and evolving the broadest portfolio of storage solutions in the industry."

Jim Elliott, VP memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc., commented: "We are very pleased to be selected by customers from around the world for the innovativeness of our SAS/SATA SSD modules and their performance in the marketplace. We have designed our SSDs to lead the industry with the best possible performance levels, and as we move to include other technologies such as SATAe and NVMe, more and more customers will appreciate the outstanding speeds and advanced features of our SSD family."
 
In the second straight year, Fusion-io led the way for PCle SSD DAS Adapters as the Market Leader pick. Once again, Fusion-io was tapped as both Performance and Innovation leader, and this time around added the Reliability Leader award. Intel, which won the Service & Support category again, landed in second place as Market Leader, with LSI, in the third position. In the Price category, a first place 3-way tie occurred among Fusion-io, Intel, and SanDisk. 

"Fusion-io is proud to be recognized by IT professionals as the leader in performance, price and reliability, qualities we provide across all ioMemory products," said Gary Orenstein, Fusion-io EVP. "Our solutions help enterprises achieve breakthrough application performance by leveraging flash as memory, and we appreciate the recognition by IT leaders for our commitment to accelerating the data that drives our customers’ businesses."
 
IT Pros selected EMC/XtremIO as the 2013 leader in 5 of 6 brand categories for All Flash SAN SSD Systems. EMC was chosen as Market Leader, and captured the top spot for Performance, Reliability, Service & Support, and Innovation. NetApp won the Price Leader category and IBM/TMS was second as Market Leader.

Respondents to 2013 SSD Brand Leader Survey included:
IT Manager/Director – Baylor College of Medicine;  IT Manager/Director – Deloitte Services LP;  Storage Administrator/Architect – ARI Fleet Management; Data Center Manager – Utah State Office of Education; IT Manager/Director – Artesian Water company (Public water utility, State of DE);  IT Manager/Director – Berkshire Capital Securities;  IT Manager/Director – Duke University;  Storage Administrator/Architect – Sony Online Entertainment;  IT Manager/Director – Kawasaki;  IT Manager/Director – Yale University; IT Manager/Director – NBC Universal;  Executive/Management – IDS (a Raytheon company);  IT Manager/Director – Ogilvy & Mather;  Server Administrator/Architect – Pitney Bowes;  IT Manager/Director – Stanford University;  Network Administrator/Architect – Transamerica;  Data Center Manager – University of Washington; St. Luke’s Hospital – Infrastructure Architect