Top 20 Storage Solution Companies - 2019

The growing influx of information in today’s digital world has set the stage for enterprises to embrace latest technologies that optimize the abundance of data for discrete business objectives. Companies now acknowledge that an optimal, efficient, and sensible way to manage big data can play a crucial role in enhancing their business success. Cheaper and denser flash/solid-state drives (SSDs), NVMe, AI, machine learning, and multi-cloud data management are more than just buzz words in the storage landscape that empower organizations to usher in efficient orchestration of business operations. In the wake of increasing cybersecurity threats and changing regulatory environment, efforts to devise realiable ways to protect and manage confidential information are also pressing demands that need immediate resolution.

Plummeting prices of NAND flash is reducing SSD costs, as flash chips represent the bulk of the cost of an SSD, enabling manufacturers to develop denser storage units for the same cost as that of lower capacity drives. Alongside, manufacturers are gradually shifting from the 32 and 64-layer flash to the 96-layer 3D flash, in order to offer higher storage capacity in the physical footprint of a standard SSD. The growing adoption of flash arrays with NVMe capabilities delivers high bandwidth with ultra-low latency, thereby supporting more applications, workloads, and use cases across enterprise IT infrastructure, generating more income for companies. NVMe provides the ability to share flash storage among multiple server racks for organizations with large database deployments and extends direct memory access capabilities over a switched fabric to create shared storage.

Alongside, analytics-driven by AI and machine learning guides IT teams to predict future storage requirements, flag infrequently used data to lower storage tiers, identify potential compliance risks, and automate routine tasks. Today, AI and machine learning have matured, transcending into other areas of IT to generate recommendations for administrators, which in turn, can be leveraged to automate day-to-day operations. In addition, multi-cloud data management allows enterprises to spread different workloads across multiple clouds, fostering improved performance, better data protection, and on-call availability. Such a diverse set of merits and advantages empowers enterprises with the capability to transparently migrate data from on-premises configurations to either public or private clouds.

At the confluence of these trends, there are several players vying for the top position in the market with an array of innovative solutions to strengthen the foundation of enterprise storage and ensure that information is always available, accurate, reusable, and protected in today’s data-driven world. However, as business requirements and goals differ, it can be cumbersome for organizations to select the right solution vendors from this crowd. To help them carry out this task with utmost ease, a distinguished panel of CEOs, CIOs, VCs, industry analysts, and CIOReview’s editorial board has narrowed down the selection to a final 20.

We present to you the “20 Most Promising Storage Solution Providers - 2019.”