Computerworld — Storage research firm Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG) Inc. today released a midrange storage array buyers guide , which includes reviews of more than 70 devices from 18 vendors rating them with a Consumer Guide-like recommendation system.

Midrange arrays are the fastest growing segment of the external disk storage industry, which saw $18 billion in revenue last year.

On each midrange array, at least 60 different features were evaluated, weighted, scored and then ranked.

"The purpose of this Buyer's Guide is not to tell users exactly which midrange array to purchase," Jerome Wendt, DCIG's president and founder, wrote in an executive summary for the guide. "Rather, it is to help guide them in coming up with a list of competitive products that have comparable features that meet their specific needs."

The product review, which took the Austin-based firm three months to compile, compares performance and pricing, power usage and space efficiency, and reliability and functionality. Wendt said his firm was not paid by any vendor to develop the guide, which is based on vendor specification information that is publicly available.

Wendt said the guide, which sells for $5,000, will be particularly useful to IT managers because it was written and prepared from a user's perspective, and because the review is open about what factors it did and did not take into consideration in its ratings. Wendt is a former data storage administrator for Midwest electronic payments company First Data Corp. He started DCIG in 2005.

The research firm, which consists of seven analysts, reviewed both Fiber Channel (FC) and Internet SCSI (discs) arrays and then ranks each model as 'Recommended', 'Excellent', 'Good' or 'Entry Level'. DCIG classified the vendor products as: "Midrange Array FC/iSCSI SAN", "Midrange Array FC SAN", "Midrange Array iSCSI SAN", "Midrange Array Hardware" and "Midrange Array Software".

The vendors whose products were reviewed include 3Par, Celeros, Compellent, Dell , Dot Hill, EMC , Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), IBM , Infortrend, NEC, NetApp (NTAP), Nexsan, Oracle /Sun, Overland Storage, Pillar Data Systems and Xiotech.

"Just coming up with that exhaustive list of storage providers and the models took some time," Wendt wrote in an introduction to the report. "Then I still had to sort through each model's hardware and software features and differentiate between them. While the differences between individual models were in many cases slight, differences do exist between each and every midrange array."

To determine which arrays would be included in the Buyer's Guide, Wendt set certain criteria, including whether the array scales to at least 30TB of capacity, has at least two controllers, and whether the vendor provided enough information for an end-user to make a meaningful decision about a purchase.

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