Enterprise Storage

The Top 8 Enterprise Storage Solutions

Explore the top Enterprise Storage Solutions that offer scalable storage options, data protection features, and seamless integration.

Last updated on Jun 25, 2024

Written by Mirren McDade

Technical review by Laura Iannini

The Top 8 Enterprise Storage Solutions include:

1. Ceph
2. DDN
3. Dell PowerScale
4. HPE Nimble Storage
5. IBM Storage Scale
6. Infinidat
7. NetApp
8. VAST

Enterprise storage solutions offer an organized and secure way for businesses to store, manage, protect, and share vast amounts of data. Enterprise storage solutions not only ensure optimal performance and capacity, but also add an additional layer of data protection, making them essential for any business that values its data. The decision of which solution is right for your organization will depend on factors including the type of data to be stored, the required storage space, scalability needs, and budget considerations.

As the amount of digital data continues to skyrocket, enterprise storage solutions have become critical. Some businesses may need fast access to data for analytic analysis, while others may need long-term storage for regulatory compliance. Therefore, it is important to choose the right solution that meets specific business requirements.

The market for enterprise storage solutions is full of many service providers, each with unique features and benefits. These range from simple on-premises hardware solutions to complex cloud-based software platforms. This guide will delve into the top enterprise storage solutions based on comprehensive assessments of each offering’s feature set, ease of use, scalability, reliability, and their customer reviews.

Ceph

Ceph is an open-source software-defined storage platform that offers object, block, and file storage in a single, unified cluster. It is designed to provide a robust and scalable solution that addresses the diverse storage needs of various applications and data types, whether hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or in a container-native environment.

The platform can quickly scale to meet changing storage demands, without any downtime. Its configuration and deployment are highly customizable, ensuring uncompromised performance. For businesses working with multiple types of storage, Ceph serves as a simplified, flexible solution that eliminates the complexity of dealing with disparate systems. Ceph comes equipped with a traditional file system interface (CephFS) that is POSIX-compliant, enabling dynamic rebalancing, high performance, and detailed metadata— all within the same scalable system. This contributes to comprehensive data management and informed business decisions.

Significantly, being open-source, Ceph fosters active community contribution across the globe, stimulating unmatched innovation and continual improvement. Its compatibility with widely used hardware enables immense storage scalability at a relatively low cost, thus eliminating vendor lock-in issues. This cost-effective and highly adaptable platform is suitable for a wide range of organizations, including start-ups, corporations, and academic institutions.

DDN

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a private company based in Chatsworth, California. Specializing in data storage, the company focuses on producing and managing innovative storage solutions for AI and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

The company delivers a solution that is designed to enhance the capabilities of GPU-based infrastructure, having been used in numerous NVIDIA DGX systems. DDN has also assisted in the construction of NVIDIA’s Selene, Cambridge-1, and EOS supercomputers, translating their experience into data storage efficiency within AI datacenters worldwide. In addition to these accomplishments, DDN claims to offer the highest Quad-Level Cell (QLC) density in the business, allowing applications to fully benefit from the capabilities of flash storage. DDN’s approach is said to streamline flash storage, which in turn reduces costs and accelerates results across an organization. By avoiding inefficient backend networks and fulfilling performance promises, DDN’s storage solutions promise to remove complexity, upscale linearly, and deliver optimized performance straight to AI applications.

Finally, DDN’s data storage solutions reportedly allow datacenters to become significantly more efficient by driving 10 times more data while using a fraction of the energy compared to other systems.

Dell PowerScale

Dell Technologies offers an AI-Ready Data Platform known as PowerScale. The platform is a highly flexible, secure, and efficient solution to store and manage unstructured data. PowerScale is designed to accelerate data-intensive workloads wherever the data resides. It is supported by advanced NVMe all-flash platform technology and enriched software optimization measures.

PowerScale provides easy scale and acceleration of the data preparation, aiding in training and inference phases of the AI pipeline. This is facilitated by NVMe all-flash nodes which deliver a performance boost in streaming reads and writes. This software-defined solution with flexible multi-cloud options enables the training and fine-tuning of AI models regardless of data location and was designed to protect AI models and algorithms from cyber threats such as data poisoning and model inversion. PowerScale safeguards AI workloads with real-time API-integrated ransomware detection and federal-grade security. It also provides automated cluster operations and high-performance storage infrastructure which optimize resource utilization and ensure AI-related tasks continue to function at optimal levels.

Dell Technology’s PowerScale is a comprehensive solution for secure, efficient, and high-performance handling of data-intensive workloads, providing a supportive infrastructure for AI workloads and aiding in data-related operations across multiple platforms.

HPE Nimble Storage

HPE Nimble Storage is a self-managing storage solution targeted at businesses seeking to leverage the benefits of next-gen storage. With an industry-standard availability between 6-9nines, it aims to provide robust data integrity and resilience, allowing firms to innovate their businesses confidently.

This platform extends its features by incorporating the AI-driven predictive intelligence of HPE InfoSight. With this, businesses can anticipate always-on and speedy applications. HPE InfoSight not only ensures visibility from storage to virtual machines and applications, but also proposes real-time, actionable recommendations to stay optimized. HPE Nimble Storage emphasizes hybrid for cloud mobility, defying data gravity constraints. It allows seamless data mobility and effortless cloud backup across the clouds, allowing businesses to enjoy hybrid cloud benefits for their apps and data in an effortless and direct approach. The solution also ensures a unique ownership experience and provides best-in-class data efficiency.

HPE Nimble Storage transforms user experience with its set of innovations across intelligence, performance, and its ownership model. This enterprise-grade platform offers users a secure environment to automate their storage, ensuring an experience that simplifies operations and innovation alike.

IBM Storage Scale

IBM Storage Scale System is a software-defined storage appliance developed to enhance AI and analytics storage capacity. The solution offers terabytes per second of performance, delivering high-speed, scalable, and secure data. It aims to cut down on inefficiencies, lower acquisition costs, and simplify storage management.

This solution offers turbo tier which optimizes data via parallel access to large files and fast tracks access to smaller files, processing millions of operations per second. IBM’s Storage Scale Erasure Code Edition (ECE) provides scale-out storage for commodity servers and provides quick data recovery, while using less storage space compared to traditional data replication methods. IBM Storage Scale System keeps a detailed log of all actions and activities within the system related to data or reports, allowing for data and report audit trails. The solution also protects file data and allows for quick recovery in the event of a cyber-attack with its safeguarded copy feature.

The system promotes global sharing and collaboration by supporting low-latency read and write access to data from anywhere using Advanced File Management (AFM) distributed routing and advanced caching technology. By consolidating data, the system supports a variety of workloads and ensures sustained high performance across your organization.

Infinidat

Infinidat is a data storage business that offers the Infinidat Enterprise Storage Portfolio, which includes InfiniBox, InfiniBox SSA, and InfiniGuard. This product portfolio aims to provide reliable and efficient solutions for primary storage, data protection, disaster recovery, business continuity, and cyber resilience for enterprises and service providers.

The InfiniBox primary storage platform delivers best-in-class solutions for mixed application workloads. This platform guarantees consistent ultra-high performance and micro-second level latency for excellent real-world application deployment. Alongside this, the InfiniBox SSA, a 100% solid-state storage platform, optimizes performance-sensitive, mission-critical workloads, achieving unprecedented real-world application performance with latencies as low as 35 microseconds. InfiniGuard, Infinidat’s advanced data protection and cyber resilience solution, not only provides comprehensive cyber protection technologies, but also promises the fastest possible recovery in the event of a cyberattack. This solution is augmented with extensive security features, role-based access controls, and multi-factor authentication for layered protection.

Infinidat offers a combination of high performance, reliable storage solutions, and advanced data protection strategies. Their product portfolio guarantees high availability, incredible performance, and strong cyber resilience. The enterprise storage portfolio, with its unique set-it-and-forget-it user experience, ensures that customers can focus on what matters most: their business.

NetApp

NetApp is a unified storage solution designed to support enterprise applications both on-premises and on leading clouds, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon AWS. Its offers flexible storage consumption and can handle any workload, any type of data, and can be deployed anywhere.

Key features of NetApp include its capability to respond effortlessly to changing business needs. Data can be seamlessly moved between cloud and on-premises environments without disruption, and the ONTAP software further enhances management and data protection across the entire infrastructure, whether it is located in the data center or in the cloud. NetApp offers a range of intelligent data infrastructure solutions catering to specific needs. For data center modernization, it dramatically reduces storage footprint and cooling cost, while handling multiple workloads and large amounts of data effectively. It also facilitates the AI journey by adding compute, storage, and networking configurations without disrupting ongoing operations, ensuring uninterrupted flow of data for deep learning processes with high-speed, flexible all-flash storage.

This solution further enhances security by reinforcing infrastructure resilience and offering effective protection against ransomware. It ensures stringent backup and recovery, preventing unauthorized data access, disclosure or modifications while maintaining compliance with applicable regulations. NetApp provides versatile storage solutions adaptable to changing business landscape and security requirements.

VAST

VAST Data offers a data platform that aims to enhance productivity and accelerate insight generation for applications which require significant computing resources. This platform is designed for modern data centers and cloud services, with a particular focus on facilitating artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning processes.

The platform combines storage, databases, and computing into a single scalable system. This design enables it to handle both structured and unstructured data at an exabyte scale, making it suitable for large-scale data projects. The platform is powered by VAST Data’s Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, which is built to simplify management and reduce costs. Key features of the VAST Data platform include the ability to capture, catalogue, refine, enrich, and preserve vast amounts of data. These capabilities cater to a wide range of analytics, data, and AI use cases, thereby promoting extensive data utilization across the organization.

The platform’s capabilities can empower businesses by providing a modern, unified platform for high performing data management. Due to its DASE architecture, the VAST Data platform offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for businesses seeking to unlock insights from their data.

Everything You Need To Know About Enterprise Storage Solutions (FAQs)

What Are Enterprise Storage Solutions?

Enterprise storage is a centralized repository for storing business information that provides users with data protection, management, and data sharing functions via connections to computer systems. As enterprises have to deal with such high volumes of business-critical information, there are stringent requirements defining how this should be carried out. These requirements may include scalability for workloads that may be made up of hundreds of terabytes (or even petabytes), without needing excessive cabling or requiring the creation of subsystems. Other important aspects of an enterprise storage system include support for multiple platforms and unlimited connectivity.

Enterprise storage solutions are comprehensive storage systems that are designed to meet large organizations and enterprises’ storage requirements. These solutions support better management and safer storage of large quantities of data generated by businesses. This data can range from critical applications and databases to multimedia files and archival data. These solutions often include a combination for software, hardware, and network components. In providing enterprises with scalable, reliable, and robust storage infrastructure, these solutions support better digital transformation and data-driven initiative.

Why Should You Use An Enterprise Storage Solution?

A good enterprise storage solution can work well to address the unique challenges and requirements of managing large and growing volumes of data in a corporate environment. Those solutions help to support organizations by accommodating their vast amounts of data and its continuous growth through safe and stable storage, as well as working to ensure fast and responsive data access and to enhance data availability and reliability. These solutions also support better operational efficiency for the organization and make it easier to maintain compliance with industry specific regulations and standards.

Enterprises should make use of an enterprise storage solutions to better manage their ongoing data growth, optimize their overall performance, boost security, and ensure the availability and reliability of critical business information. These solutions contribute to the streamlining of operations, improvements in data management practices, and the meeting of the organization’s dynamic storage needs.

What Features Should You Look For In Enterprise Storage Solutions?

Enterprise storage solutions can come with a wide variety of features, so organizations should understand what capabilities they require before narrowing down their search. However, some key capabilities that all good solutions should provide include:

Scalability – Large organizations and enterprises need to be flexible and adaptable, so any storage solutions they consider need to be able to accommodate large volumes of data that may fluctuate. This scalability should include the ability to scale vertically by upgrading individual components for increases in capacity, and to scale horizontally by adding more components to the storage infrastructure.
Performance – Handing large datasets and supporting applications with demanding I/O requirements will likely require high performance storage. This means that the enterprise storage solution will need to provide capabilities like high-speed interfaces, optimized storage protocols, high speed interfaces, and support faster data access through technologies like solid-state drives (SSDs).
Redundancy and High Availability – Redundancy and high availability are both concepts that relate to the continuity of services and systems. Redundancy is a type of fault tolerance that involves ensuring there are backups and spare components for systems in place to take over if there is a failure. High availability is ensuring that systems remain accessible and operational at all times, regardless of the situation. Enterprise storage solutions ensure data availability and prevent service disruptions by implementing RAID configurations, mirrored disks, and failover mechanisms.
Data Tiering – Enterprise storage solutions typically offer data tiering, meaning that data is categorized based on its importance and access frequency. Data that needs to be accessed most often is stored in high-performance storage, while data that is less critical of that does not need to be accessed as often is moved to lower-cost, slower storage.
Storage Visualization – This allows organizations to get a unified view of their storage resources. By abstracting the underlying physical storage infrastructure, storage visualization helps to simplify management, improved utilization of resources, and allows for greater flexibility in adapting to shifting storage needs.
Tools for Data Management – For important tasks like provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting, having robust data management tools in place is essential. A good enterprise storage solution should provide these tools in order to support administrators in efficiently managing storage resources, allocating space, and monitoring performance metrics.
Security – Security is important for all organizations, but particularly for large enterprises as they experience an increased volume of attempted attacks and are at higher risk of errors being made, which may result in a breach. Enterprise storage solutions should combat this heightened risk with encryption mechanisms, both at rest and in transit, to better protect sensitive information. They typically also provide various access controls to ensure that authorized users are the only ones granted access to restricted data.

Mirren McDade

Journalist & Content Writer

Mirren McDade is a writer and journalist at Expert Insights, spending each day researching, writing, editing and publishing content, covering a variety or topics and solutions, and interviewing industry experts. She is an experienced copywriter with a background in a range of industries, including cloud business technologies, cloud security, information security and cyber security, and has conducted interviews with several industry experts. Mirren holds a First Class Honors degree in English from Edinburgh Napier University.

Laura Iannini

Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.