CRN's 2019 Products Of The Year

SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE

VMWARE VSAN

WINNER: OVERALL

Enhancements to VMware vSAN 6.7 have included capabilities making it easier for customers to adopt hyper-converged infrastructure via simplified operations, efficient infrastructure and rapid support resolution. Administrators can now quickly spin up new hyper-converged infrastructure clusters faster while reducing maintenance operations time. The new HCI deployment helps deliver improved efficiency due to automated capacity reclamation, and helps administrators anticipate data needs with new predictive tools. The offering also now takes advantage of granular diagnostic tools and historical data to help decrease time-to-resolution when issues arrive. Other updates have brought tight integration with Kubernetes container orchestration through using a Container Storage Interface driver for vSphere.

Finalist: DataCore One

DataCore Software’s DataCore One offering centralizes the control of varying classes of storage across primary, secondary and archive. Key capabilities include DataCore Insight Services—a cloud-based engine for predictive storage analytics to enable early detection of issues, capacity planning and recommendations.

Finalist: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Recent upgrades to Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2019 include deduplication and compression for Microsoft’s Resilient File System volumes, enabling storage of up to 10 times more data on the same volume. Storage Spaces Direct also now offers native support for persistent memory such as Intel Optane DC.

Finalist: NetApp Cloud Volumes

Updates have included the addition of support for NetApp Cloud Volumes on HCI, enabling the extension of Cloud Volumes’ highperformance persistent storage to on-premises deployments. NetApp also unveiled Cloud Volumes OnTap for Google Cloud to bring enhanced performance, availability and data protection capabilities for running applications in Google Cloud.