2017 North American Data Storage & Management Technology Innovation Award

Transcription

1 2017 North American Data Storage & Management Technology Innovation Award

2 Contents Background and Company Performance... 3 Industry Challenges... 3 Technology Attributes and Future Business Value... 4 Conclusion... 7 Significance of Technology Innovation... 8 Understanding Technology Innovation... 8 Key Benchmarking Criteria... 9 Best Practice Award Analysis for Reduxio Systems... 9 Decision Support Scorecard... 9 Technology Attributes Future Business Value Decision Support Matrix Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards Research Methodology About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

3 Background and Company Performance Industry Challenges The data storage industry is undergoing transformational change driven by the explosion in the amount of data that enterprises need to store and manage. As per the Frost & Sullivan s analysis, it is predicted the amount of data stored and managed by enterprises will soon be skyrocketing as it will surpass Exabyte ranges in the near future. As enterprises, mid-range companies, and small-scale businesses grapple today with this challenge; the focus has shifted from data storage to data management. Organizations are not only facing the challenge of explosive data growth, but also the fact that digital systems have evolved from being components in the background of business operations to being considered mission-critical systems and at the very heart of business operations. In spite of the exponential data growth, IT budgets have not kept pace, with only nominal increases, driving IT staff to seek out cost-effective solutions. From a storage perspective, there s an increased awareness that there are different classes of storage is required to support different business applications to ensure that the infrastructure is optimal from a cost and performance standpoint. As the amount of data and its importance to businesses has grown, there is an increased focus on data protection in order to prevent data loss and/or recover from issues such as data corruption, human error, and application bugs. In addition, the rising prevalence and sophistication of malware attacks, such as ransomware (e.g., WannaCry), have created a profound sense of vulnerability among enterprises, which have been victimized by these cyber-attacks, further exacerbating the challenges with data protection. Organizations are increasingly demanding better SLA s, in the form of low or near-zero RPO/RTO s from storage and backup vendors. The ability to have zero downtime and no data loss in case of an incident is challenging with conventional data protection solutions, with time-consuming management, operational complexity, and the high cost of storage infrastructure. Storage technology providers, both incumbents and, emerging vendors, have come to market with new solutions to store, protect, and manage data. Organizations have shown an increasing willingness to adopt new solutions and approaches to improve data storage infrastructure. However, these solutions continue to have some or all of the following shortcomings: Silos of capacity and capability: Capacity silos always result in inefficiency as each silo introduces waste and increases management complexity. Capability silos introduce multiple points of management, which increases management overhead and operational costs. Limits on RPO and RTO: When multiple silos are present in the storage infrastructure data copy is required between systems to create copies for protection and for restore. This limits the minimum RPO and RTO that can be achieved without Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

4 resorting to expensive synchronous replication. In addition, movement of data creates efficiencies since data might be stored in optimized form on system will have to be restored to its original form for transfer and then re-optimized on the target system. Agents and Integration - This presents an increasingly significant challenge as environments become more complex and the number of applications keeps growing. Also on the primary storage system, the process of data capture can affect the overall storage performance as data accesses for data protection competes with the requirements of the applications running on the system. Founded in 2012 by veterans of the data storage industry, Reduxio Systems focuses on simplifying data management and data protection by enabling the convergence of primary and secondary storage management into a single platform. Reduxio provides primary storage for applications, with a set of novel integrated data protection capabilities - eliminating a number of the challenges of existing solutions. With Reduxio customers can build self-protecting enterprise-grade storage infrastructure that is simpler and cost-effective to deploy, manage and protect. Source: Reduxio Systems Technology Attributes and Future Business Value Visionary Innovation Reduxio s founding team has, on average, over 20 years of storage industry experience with major vendors like NetApp, IBM and Dell/EMC. According to them, the driving force behind the creation of Reduxio was their observation that long-established vendors were unwilling to obsolete their siloed architectures and solutions despite the fact that they grow increasingly ineffective and unnecessarily complex with each passing year. This led to the determination that an entirely new architecture was required, that would eliminate the need for snapshots in favor of a time-based approach that would dramatically improve data recovery granularity and timeliness, while drastically reducing administrative overhead. Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

5 Unlike the volume centric architecture of traditional storage systems, the Reduxio architecture is data-centric with volumes and offset within volumes being attributes of data. This provides complete virtualization between the logical view of storage and the physical storage and enables the unique set of data management capabilities that Reduxio has to manage, protect, and Source: Reduxio Systems provision storage. This architecture which is delivered in the form of Reduxio s TimeOS storage operating system allows the unification of primary and secondary data management into a single platform. Reduxio introduced the HX550 hybrid storage system at the VMWorld 2015 convention, where it received the award for Best of VMWorld. Reduxio launched the patented TimeOS solution as a storage appliance, and they were able to acquire 100+ customers in their first full year, which is quite remarkable for a newly emerging vendor in the data center space. Reduxio achieved product/market fit very rapidly, validating this new architectural approach across a broad range of industries and use cases, for both large global enterprises and SMEs. Product Impact Reduxio s flagship product HX550 is a hybrid flash storage system that enables the convergence of primary and secondary storage management into a single platform that can allow organizations to simplify their storage infrastructure and improve overall efficiency. In June 2017, with the release of TimeOS v3, Reduxio introduced new capabilities that further simplify the end-to-end management of application data. The Reduxio solution offers the following one of a kind core capabilities: BackDating : A patented technology that makes schedule-based snapshots obsolete and allows recovery of any application's data at 1 second granularity. This unique capability replaces snapshots for a wide variety of use cases including recovery of production applications, rapid provisioning of images, and creating copies to support test and development. The one second RPO supported by BackDating makes this best mechanism to restore critical information after a successful ransomware or malware attack. NoRestore : Integrates copy data management natively into the primary storage. Based on user configured policies, NoRestore saves continuous incremental copies of data on a shareable remote repository. The repository can be any iscsi storage device or an object store that may be local or in the public cloud. Any Reduxio instance can attach to the repository and restore any point in time of any volume Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

6 available on the repository instantaneously. This near-zero RTO is achieved using Reduxio s virtualization technology that allows a volume to be instantiated by reading just the metadata. NoRestore today supports a minimum RTO of 5 minutes. NoRestore can be used to eliminate legacy backup and replication solutions for disaster recovery, enable data sharing between distributed sites to support development and test, and to retire applications to the public cloud. NoMigrate : An advanced data migration and data mobility technology built into the TimeOS operating system leverages the global virtualization of data e to enable instantaneous migration of applications and large data sets from third-party storage systems or between Reduxio systems. It eliminates the complexity of balancing workloads and data, migration of data between sites, and the decommissioning of legacy systems. Application Diversity Reduxio supports a broad range of core enterprise applications with its storage solution. The high performance primary storage along with the data management capabilities have allowed Reduxio to successfully address the storage needs of a range of critical workloads including databases (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc), virtual environments (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc.), enterprise applications (SAP, etc.,), private cloud (OpenStack, etc), and for application development. Reduxio has installed a total of 200+ systems worldwide with more than 150 notable enterprise customers and has seen increased adoption across various industries, highlighting the value of its solution. As their installed base grows, Reduxio is moving ahead with its plans to offer a software-only solution. Industry Impact Reduxio s primary objective was to distinguish itself by being the first storage vendor to deliver near zero RPO and RTO data recovery with infinite granularity, with a focus on radically simplifying storage operations by combining primary and secondary storage under a single platform. The company has committed itself to human-centric design, with a special focus on an extremely intuitive user experience, drawing on best practices in human factors and leveraging game designers. A constant refrain from Reduxio users is how much they love the interface, something we have never heard from storage system users before in our many years of researching this space. As a result, organizations that have deployed Reduxio s systems can assign junior-level storage administrators who can grasp the data storage and management aspects with ease, compared with the need for experienced data administrators for competing systems, which often require administrators to undergo significant training and certification before they become proficient. Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

7 For its design focus, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Reduxio s thought leadership in reinventing the way that organizations think about storage. Conclusion Reduxio has successfully built a storage solution that can manage different classes of media designed for today s complex hybrid environments, and is one of the first vendors to integrate data protection and copy data management capabilities into a platform that provides primary storage for applications. It has a flash-first architecture, always-on global deduplication, compression, and rapid relocation of data among multiple tiers, always ensuring an optimal price / performance trade-off. With its strong overall performance, Reduxio Systems has earned Frost & Sullivan s 2017 Technology Innovation Award. Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

8 Significance of Technology Innovation Ultimately, growth in any organization depends upon finding new ways to excite the market and upon maintaining a long-term commitment to innovation. At its core, technology innovation, or any other type of innovation, can only be sustained with leadership in three key areas: understanding demand, nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the competition. Understanding Technology Innovation Technology innovation begins with a spark of creativity that is systematically pursued, developed, and commercialized. That spark can result from a successful partnership, a productive in-house innovation group, or a bright-minded individual. Regardless of the source, the success of any new technology is ultimately determined by its innovativeness and its impact on the business as a whole. Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

9 Key Benchmarking Criteria For the Technology Innovation Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently evaluated two key factors Technology Attributes and Future Business Value according to the criteria identified below. Technology Attributes Criterion 1: Industry Impact Criterion 2: Product Impact Criterion 3: Scalability Criterion 4: Visionary Innovation Criterion 5: Application Diversity Future Business Value Criterion 1: Financial Performance Criterion 2: Customer Acquisition Criterion 3: Technology Licensing Criterion 4: Brand Loyalty Criterion 5: Human Capital Best Practices Award Analysis for Reduxio Systems Decision Support Scorecard To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance categories, Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Scorecard. This tool allows our research and consulting teams to objectively analyze performance, according to the key benchmarking criteria listed in the previous section, and to assign ratings on that basis. The tool follows a 10-point scale that allows for nuances in performance evaluation. Ratings guidelines are illustrated below. RATINGS GUIDELINES The Decision Support Scorecard is organized by Technology Attributes and Future Business Value (i.e., these are the overarching categories for all 10 benchmarking criteria; the definitions for each criterion are provided beneath the scorecard.). The research team confirms the veracity of this weighted scorecard through sensitivity analysis, which confirms that small changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not lead to a significant change in the overall relative rankings of the companies. Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

10 The results of this analysis are shown below. To remain unbiased and to protect the interests of all organizations reviewed, we have chosen to refer to the other key participants as Competitor 2 and Competitor 3. Measurement of 1 10 (1 = poor; 10 = excellent) Technology Innovation Technology Attributes Future Business Value Average Rating Reduxio Systems Competitor Competitor Technology Attributes Criterion 1: Industry Impact Requirement: Technology enables the pursuit of groundbreaking ideas, contributing to the betterment of the entire industry. Criterion 2: Product Impact Requirement: Specific technology helps enhance features and functionalities of the entire product line for the company. Criterion 3: Scalability Requirement: Technology is scalable, enabling new generations of products over time, with increasing levels of quality and functionality. Criterion 4: Visionary Innovation Requirement: Specific new technology represents true innovation based on a deep understanding of future needs and applications. Criterion 5: Application Diversity Requirement: New technology serves multiple products, multiple applications, and multiple user environments. Future Business Value Criterion 1: Financial Performance Requirement: Potential is high for strong financial performance in terms of revenues, operating margins, and other relevant financial metrics. Criterion 2: Customer Acquisition Requirement: Specific technology enables acquisition of new customers, even as it enhances value to current customers. Criterion 3: Technology Licensing Requirement: New technology displays great potential to be licensed across many sectors and applications, thereby driving incremental revenue streams. Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

11 Future Business Value BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH Criterion 4: Brand Loyalty Requirement: New technology enhances the company s brand, creating and/or nurturing brand loyalty. Criterion 5: Human Capital Requirement: Customer impact is enhanced through the leverage of specific technology, translating into positive impact on employee morale and retention. Decision Support Matrix Once all companies have been evaluated according to the Decision Support Scorecard, analysts then position the candidates on the matrix shown below, enabling them to visualize which companies are truly breakthrough and which ones are not yet operating at best-in-class levels. High Reduxio Systems Competitor 2 Competitor 3 Low Low Technology Attributes High Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

12 Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices Frost & Sullivan analysts follow a 10-step process to evaluate Award candidates and assess their fit with select best practice criteria. The reputation and integrity of the Awards are based on close adherence to this process. STEP OBJECTIVE KEY ACTIVITIES OUTPUT 1 Monitor, target, and screen Identify Award recipient candidates from around the globe Conduct in-depth industry research Identify emerging sectors Scan multiple geographies Pipeline of candidates who potentially meet all bestpractice criteria 2 Perform 360-degree research Perform comprehensive, 360-degree research on all candidates in the pipeline Interview thought leaders and industry practitioners Assess candidates fit with best-practice criteria Rank all candidates Matrix positioning of all candidates performance relative to one another 3 Invite thought leadership in best practices Perform in-depth examination of all candidates Confirm best-practice criteria Examine eligibility of all candidates Identify any information gaps Detailed profiles of all ranked candidates 4 Initiate research director review Conduct an unbiased evaluation of all candidate profiles Brainstorm ranking options Invite multiple perspectives on candidates performance Update candidate profiles Final prioritization of all eligible candidates and companion best-practice positioning paper 5 Assemble panel of industry experts Present findings to an expert panel of industry thought leaders Share findings Strengthen cases for candidate eligibility Prioritize candidates Refined list of prioritized Award candidates 6 Conduct global industry review Build consensus on Award candidates eligibility Hold global team meeting to review all candidates Pressure-test fit with criteria Confirm inclusion of all eligible candidates Final list of eligible Award candidates, representing success stories worldwide 7 Perform quality check Develop official Award consideration materials Perform final performance benchmarking activities Write nominations Perform quality review High-quality, accurate, and creative presentation of nominees successes 8 Reconnect with panel of industry experts Finalize the selection of the best-practice Award recipient Review analysis with panel Build consensus Select recipient Decision on which company performs best against all best-practice criteria 9 Communicate recognition Inform Award recipient of Award recognition Present Award to the CEO Inspire the organization for continued success Celebrate the recipient s performance Announcement of Award and plan for how recipient can use the Award to enhance the brand 10 Take strategic action Upon licensing, company is able to share Award news with stakeholders and customers Coordinate media outreach Design a marketing plan Assess Award s role in future strategic planning Widespread awareness of recipient s Award status among investors, media personnel, and employees Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth

13 The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards Research Methodology Frost & Sullivan s 360-degree research methodology represents the analytical rigor of our research process. It offers a 360-degree-view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies. Too often companies make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their environment, leading to errors of both omission and commission. Successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the 360-degree research methodology provides an evaluation platform for benchmarking industry 360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN THE CHAOS participants and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels. About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages more than 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the investment community from 45 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit Frost & Sullivan We Accelerate Growth