Storage Movers And Shakers

We asked our poll respondents about their use of various vendors in four areas. For Tier 1 and Tier 2 primary storage, deduplication, and backup and archiving, we trended their responses over 12 months. We also asked respondents for the first time to rate 15 storage virtualization vendors. Full results are available in our 2011 State of Storage report.

For primary storage, Hewlett-Packard came out on top in our latest poll, followed by EMC, Dell-EqualLogic, IBM, and NetApp, which posted the biggest gains among the industry leaders, up 9 percentage points from last year's survey. Copan and Sepaton also advanced; both are up 10 points year over year, from 4% to 14%. IBM and Sun each slid 3 points, to 47% and 30% among respondents.

The deduplication field is dominated by EMC-Avamar-DataDomain, which was selected by 59% of respondents, up from 50% last year. Runners up NetApp, HP, IBM-Diligent, and Microsoft lost ground, while fifth-place Symantec-NetBackup gained 8 points.

EMC is also the backup and archiving leader, at 60%, down slightly from 62% last year. HP, IBM, NetApp, and Dell-EqualLogic round out the top five. HP and IBM were down 7 points and 10 points, while NetApp and Dell posted modest gains.

The storage virtualization field is a bit tighter. Of the 15 vendors readers rated, EMC, IBM, HP, NetApp, and Dell-EqualLogic are respondents' top five. --Lorna Garey ([email protected])