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Entries this year covered everything from host bus adapters to storage management software. While last years finalists and winner were all software tools, hardware products took the top spots in this years program.
WINNER
NetApp FAS900 Series Storage Appliances (FAS960, FAS940)
Network Appliance Inc.s NetApp FAS900 Series Storage Appliances successfully blend the capabilities of NAS (network-attached storage) and SANs (storage area networks) into a single hardware platform and may eliminate the “SAN or NAS” spending debates that go on in most IT shops. With its ability to support a wide range of protocols, the NetApp FAS900 appliances will fit into a wide variety of IT environments. Each appliance can support thousands of users and scale to 24 terabytes of storage in a single system and 8 terabytes in a single file system. The appliances also provide solid manageability and data protection capabilities.
FINALISTS
EMC Centera
EMC Corp.s EMC Centera is a software-driven storage architecture designed to deal with the storage of “fixed content,” such as medical and check images, e-mail attachments, broadcast content, and satellite imagery. Odd as it sounds, EMC Centera turns hard-drive-based storage into a permanent WORM archive system. To keep track of fixed content, EMC Centera assigns addresses to content by calculating a 128-bit “claim check” from the contents binary representation, then translates the 128-bit result into a unique 27-character identifier.
HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 2C12D 2.0
Hewlett-Packard Co.s HP StorageWorks EVA (Enterprise Virtual Array) 2C12D 2.0 is an impressive enterprise-class storage unit and one of the first to include built-in virtualization capabilities. This will allow IT managers to easily carve up storage resources and assign them to users and applications on demand. The judges felt that the product illustrated the fruits of the HP-Compaq Computer Corp. merger—combining HPs data center expertise with Compaqs cost-effectiveness.
Excellence Awards Winners and Finalists: