The 7th Annual eWEEK Excellence Awards: The Winners - ' E' (
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CATEGORY: ENTERPRISE STORAGE SOFTWARE
WINNER
LeftHand Networks
SAN/iQ
Rolling out or extending an enterprise storage system means making large investments in terms of both money and trust. Once the investment has been made, theres nothing like the potential threat of a client jumping ship to do business with a rival vendor to keep most storage hardware providers honest and responsive.
Thats why our judges were impressed by LeftHand Networks SAN/iQ iSCI storage software platform, which insulates companies from vendor lock-in with its amenability for working with multiple hardware systems.
According to SAN/iQ, the software works with a variety of hardware platforms, including the HP ProLiant DL380, IBM x3650, LeftHands own NSM 260 and NSM 160, as well as with SAN solutions from more than 20 other worldwide OEM partners.
Our judges also appreciated the way that the new user interface included with SAN/iQ Version 6.6 simplifies SAN (storage area network) management by presenting administrators with a centralized management console that adheres to familiar Microsoft Windows user interface metaphors and that enables administrators to manage physical storage assets from their main data center, across a campus or spread out in remote locations.
We also took note of SAN/iQs innovative distributed architecture, through which LeftHand Networks promises to deliver storage scalability while maintaining good disk performance and network throughput across additional clustered storage server nodes.
Also compelling are the data protection and high availability virtues that flow from LeftHands synchronous data replication, snapshots and remote copy functionality.
FINALISTS
Brocade
StorageX
Brocade StorageX is an integrated suite of applications that logically aggregates distributed file data across heterogeneous storage environments and across CIFS (Common Internet File Systems) and NFS (Network File System)-based file systems, while providing policies to automate data management functions. Our judges also gave a thumbs up to StorageXs data classification and reporting, its ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) capabilities and its storage optimization options.
EMC
Avamar
EMC Avamar software enables companies to quickly and reliably protect data residing in remote offices, LAN attached server, and VMware environments, while dramatically reducing the required network bandwidth and backup storage.
Avamar software boasts innovative global data de-duplication and single instance storage technology to reduce the size of backup data at the source before it is transferred across the network, something our judges think is a true asset.
Analytics & Reporting
Application Development
Business Integration Systems
Business Relationship Management
Desktop & Mobile Hardware
E-Business Foundations
E-Mail Management & Security
Enterprise Collaboration
Enterprise Storage Hardware
Enterprise Storage Software
IT Quality Assurance Tools
Productivity Applications
Server Hardware
Networking & Management Tools
Networking Infrastructure
System & Application Management
Authentication & User Management
Network Data-Stream Protection
Vulnerability Assessment & Remediation
IT Infrastructure 
