Editor's note
Our annual Products of the Year competition, now in its 16th year, pits the best data management and storage offerings against one another to see which will win top honors as the year's best products.
It started with an open invitation to vendors, asking them to submit their new and upgraded data storage products for consideration. From there, we winnowed down the entrants to 47 finalists spread over five categories: backup and disaster recovery software and services, backup and disaster recovery hardware, software-defined storage, storage arrays and storage management tools.
Our Products of the Year competition focuses on data management and storage products introduced or upgraded during the previous year. We want to recognize innovation and give new and lesser-known products and startups a chance to better compete with established vendors. Incremental upgrades don't cut it for this contest. And innovation isn't the only criteria products are rated on. Performance, ease of integration, ease of use, functionality and value are also of paramount importance to our judges, who include analysts, consultants, users, and Storage magazine and SearchStorage writers and editors.
We extend our heartfelt and sincere congratulations to all our 2017 data storage Products of the Year finalists for earning their place on this year's list. Click the links below to learn more about each 2017 Storage magazine and SearchStorage Products of the Year finalist. Then tune into the February 2018 issue of Storage magazine and head over to SearchStorage in February to find out which finalists beat out the competition to earn bronze, silver and gold for the best data management and storage products of 2017.
12017 POY finalists
The backup and disaster recovery software and services category covers backup and DR software; cloud backup and recovery services; and on-premises backup and DR, snapshotting, replication and archiving products.
22017 POY finalists
Products eligible for consideration in the software-defined storage category must run on standard servers with no underlying hardware dependencies. These products include software that pools and centrally manages storage; object stores; file systems; and hyper-converged software products that combine storage, compute and virtualization. They can be offered as software-only or installed on standard X86 server appliances.
32017 POY finalists
Storage array products eligible for consideration include ones that come with flash storage, hard disk drives or a hybrid mixture. Products include Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN, NAS, multiprotocol systems, converged infrastructure, solid-state drives, hard disk drives, disk controllers and caching appliances. Eligible arrays have software management and storage features integrated with the storage media, rather than software that can be run on any appliance.
42017 POY finalists
The data storage management tools category includes software for SAN management and storage resource management, along with products for third-party analytics, configuration management, performance monitoring, provisioning and data reduction.
52016 POY finalists
There were 54 finalists in last year's Storage Products of the Year competition, spread across six categories: all-flash storage systems, backup and disaster recovery software and services, backup hardware, hard disk and hybrid storage systems, SAN management tools and server-based storage products. Some of the vendors and products from 2016's finalist list have made the 2017 list, while others haven't.