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Editor's note

Storage magazine and SearchStorage's annual Products of the Year awards, now in its 17th year, pits the best in data management and storage against one another in a battle royal to see who wins coveted gold, silver and bronze as the year's best products.

Vendors submitted new and upgraded products for consideration across five categories: backup and disaster recovery software and services, backup and disaster recovery hardware, software-defined and cloud storage, storage arrays and storage management tools. We then narrowed down the entrants to 51 finalists, representing the cream of the crop over the past year.

Our Products of the Year awards level the playing field to give lesser-known and newer products a chance to compete with the goliaths of the data management and storage industry by keeping the focus on offerings rolled out or significantly upgraded over the course of the preceding year. Incrementally upgraded products aren't allowed in this competition. Innovation is only one of several criteria with which we rate finalists, however. Our panel of analysts, consultants, users and Storage magazine and SearchStorage writers and editors also consider ease of integration, ease of use, functionality and value when evaluating products.

Earning a place among our 2018 data management and storage Products of the Year finalists is no small feat. We congratulate each and every vendor whose product made the grade for 2018. You can learn more about our finalists by clicking the links in each of the category sections below. We will unveil our gold, silver and bronze winners in the February 2019 issue of Storage magazine and right here on SearchStorage that month as well. Stay tuned.

1Backup and DR hardware

Products covered in this category include backup software integrated with hardware appliances, data protection hardware, backup media, tape libraries and drives, disk backup targets, devices for deduplication and gateway appliances for cloud backup and replication.

2Backup and DR software and services

Entries in this category include backup and recovery software; cloud backup and recovery services; and on-premises backup and disaster recovery, replication, snapshotting and archiving products.

3Software-defined and cloud storage

Products in the software-defined and cloud storage category must be able to run on standard servers or in the cloud and not be dependent on underlying hardware on premises. Software that centrally manages storage across servers or clouds is included, as well as object stores; cloud-native storage; file systems not tied to specific arrays; and hyper-converged systems that combine compute, storage and virtualization. These products can be available as software-only, installed on standard X86 server appliances or run in the cloud.

4Storage arrays

Entries in this category include storage arrays with flash storage, hard disk drives or a hybrid mixture. The products are comprised of solid-state drives, hard disk drives, caching appliances, disk controllers, Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN, NAS, converged infrastructure products and multiprotocol systems. Arrays considered have all the software management and storage features combined with storage media, as opposed to software that can be run on any appliance.

5Storage management tools

Products in this category consist of SAN and storage resource management software. Configuration management, third-party analytics, provisioning, performance monitoring and data reduction products are also included in this category.

6Who were finalists last year?

Forty-seven finalists in data management and storage made the cut in the 2017 Storage Products of the Year competition across five categories: backup and disaster recovery software and services, backup and DR hardware, software-defined storage, storage arrays and storage management tools. A number of vendors and products from 2017's finalist list have made the 2018 list.