Top Enterprise Storage Providers

Top 5 Enterprise Storage Providers

Enterprise storage solutions help IT professionals manage, query, retrieve, and protect critical business data. The top storage solutions make storing data simple and mitigate issues that may lead to data loss, lack of data integrity, and data theft. To help tech decision-makers and Enterprise-level IT pros find the right storage vendor, we highlight 5 of the top Enterprise storage providers and provide a brief list of their features, benefits, and pricing, where available.

Table of contents

What is Enterprise Data Storage?

Enterprise data storage vendors are organizations that provide systems and infrastructure aimed at helping companies store and manage information in a stable and secure environment. Typical uses of Enterprise storage software can include:

  • Maintaining data integrity
  • Data redundancy and backups
  • Data access and limiting user access
  • Data analysis and analytics
  • Helping ensure industry and regulatory compliance

Best Enterprise Storage Providers

Below is a list of 5 Enterprise data storage companies, followed by a list of the most important things to look for when choosing an Enterprise data storage solution.

Dell EMC: Best Out-of-the-Box Storage Solution

Dell EMC makes our list for its ability to simplify the management and configuration of virtualized storage environments, particularly in organizations that anticipate a period of growth or looking to scale quickly. Its storage options include cloud and all-flash and excel when used for storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) environments.

Dell EMC storage is best for those looking to:

  • Take advantage of a turnkey storage solution
  • Achieve a lower total cost of ownership when compared to other options in its class
  • Upgrade infrastructure without the need to re-platform applications

Key Features of Dell EMC

Dell EMC offers the following key features:

  • Enterprise-class object, file, and HDFS support
  • Better performance insight with real-time IoT data ingestion and real-time analytics
  • Performance monitoring and alerting tools to better forecast and predict activity and address capacity alerts and issues
  • Data management tools that mitigate garbage data, improve storage space consumption and reduce metadata overhead

Dell EMC Overhead

You can learn more about Dell EMC’s pricing by visiting its storage products page.

AWS (Amazon Web Services): Best Overall Data Storage Solution

Offered by tech giant Amazon, Amazon Web Services – AWS for short – is the leader in data storage systems, owning a purported 92% of the market share with nearly a million users. It has a host of options under its umbrella, which include the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Elastic File System (EFS), AWS Snow Family and AWS Storage gateway, and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

Key Features of AWS

Some of the key features of Amazon Web Services as they relate to data storage include:

  • Ability to categorize data based on bucket names, object tags, and prefixes
  • Ability to perform batch operations on data to scale
  • Data versioning
  • Object storage usage monitoring and activity trends
  • User access monitoring and authorization
  • Advanced security and encryption (server-side and client-side)
  • SQL Query in place for data analytics within Amazon S3
  • Easy data migration for multiple platforms, including hybrid, cloud, and on-premise

AWS Pricing

Pricing for Amazon Web Services will vary greatly depending on the needs of your project, the size of your data set, usage, and so forth. Fortunately, AWS has a price calculator to help you average out cost expectations, which you can find on the AWS Pricing page.

Google Cloud BigQuery: Best for Real-Time Data Analysis

Google Cloud is another great option for organizations looking for a storage platform capable of handling large datasets with an emphasis on security, BigData queries, and real-time analytics. BigQuery is known not only for being a reliable option but also an efficient one, as it can handle large-scale data processing tasks without the usual performance issues you might expect. Organizations use Google Cloud BigQuery for:

  • High-performant data queries
  • Backup and recovery of large, sensitive datasets
  • Data visualization on a large scale
  • To leverage machine learning and AI tools to enhance its already powerful data analysis
  • As a Serverless option to reduce initial investment, overhead, and maintenance resources

Key Features of Google Cloud BigQuery

Some of the most important features of Google Cloud BigQuery include:

  • Uses a custom architecture (Dremel) to optimize queries
  • Automatic backups for seamless data recovery in the event of data loss or corruption
  • Integrates with various data visualization tools, including Google Data Studio and ML libraries
  • Supports SQL querying
  • Runs in a Serverless environment
  • Free option up to 10GB storage and 1 TB queries per month

Google Cloud BigQuery Pricing

Like most Enterprise storage solutions, Google Cloud BigQuery pricing can be confusing. They do offer a Free version, offering 10GB of storage and 1 TB of queries per month. Beyond that, you will need to pay for higher levels of storage, querying capabilities, analysis features, data extraction, and more. You can learn more about pricing tiers from the Google Cloud BigQuery pricing page.

IBM Data Storage: Best Hybrid Option

Similar to other listings in our round-up of top Enterprise storage providers, IBM offers multiple solutions to store your organization’s data. Unlike other options, however, IBM’s offerings excel in hybrid cloud environments. Tools within the IBM Storage umbrella include IBM Storage Fusion, IBM Storage Protect for Cloud, IBM Storage Defender, and IBM Storage Insights. Each of these solutions comes with its own set of features, aimed at providing clients with tools to automate IT processes, configurations, and manage data.

In addition to software, IBM Storage has a solid mix of hardware solutions as well. These include IBM Storage Networking, IBM Storage Tape, FlashSystem, and more.

Combined (or separately), IBM Storage options allow IT professionals to:

  • Predict storage needs via Artificial Intelligence
  • Optimize performance through tooling and high-performant hardware
  • Manage workloads and datasets
  • Integrate storage with popular cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure
  • Combine on-premises storage with cloud environments

IBM Storage Features

Some of IBM Storage’s key features include:

  • Containerization and data orchestration
  • AIOps integrations
  • Customizable file share capacity based on workloads
  • Advanced data encryption, including data-at-rest and data-in-flight
  • Highly scalable for growing businesses
  • Integrates with AI and Machine Learning tools

IBM Storage Pricing

IBM is not very transparent with their pricing. To learn more, they suggest that you contact their sales team via their IBM Storage Pricing page.

NetApp: Best for Ransomware Protection

NetApp is a flash storage solution for the Enterprise that is known for its ransomware protection tools and is a great option for organizations with a security-first mindset. It offers several varieties of storage solutions, including all-flash, hybrid-flash, and object storage systems.

NetApp offers hardware and software data storage and is renowned for its simplicity when it comes to data management and storage. It is considered on-par as far as performance when compared to other storage options on our list and is typically used for:

  • Infrastructure management automation
  • Serving files over NFS
  • Creating consistent configuration and management environments
  • To store and retrieve data and files
  • Scalable data processing
  • Enhancing application performance

NetApp Features

Among NetApp’s most important features are:

  • Multiprotocol file and block sharing
  • NFS file service and system configuration
  • Data storage, access, and organization management tools
  • Simple data migration and data protection integrations

NetApp Pricing

NetApp pricing and demos are available via a sales inquiry form, located on the NetApp Contact page.

What to look for in Enterprise Storage Providers

While your specific needs from an Enterprise storage provider will vary based on the requirements of your projects, in general, you will want to consider the following when choosing a data storage vendor:

  • What are your storage requirements and how might that change in the future? These requirements can include metrics such as data size and volume, types of data (structured or unstructured), and types of access/frequency of access. Is the vendor able to handle these requirements?
  • What is your budget for the project? Your storage budget should factor in things such as maintenance, upfront costs, hardware and software, training, and continuing operation fees. Additionally, you will want to factor in the total cost of ownership for the lifespan of the project. Does this total budget align with what the vendor has to offer?
  • What storage architecture and systems make sense for your project? Will you require cloud storage, object storage, flash storage, NAS (network attached storage), SAN (storage area network), on-premises, or a hybrid solution?
  • Consider performance metrics, such as IOPS (input/output operations per second), latency, throughput, uptime, and so forth. Is the service able to scale based on future growth needs? What sort of availability does the vendor offer? Are there failsafes in place, such as data redundancy, failovers, automatic backups, and data replication?
  • What sort of security and monitoring tools does the vendor provide? What sort of malware and ransomware protection is afforded, do they offer disaster recovery and data encryption, and can they meet your compliance requirements?
  • Is there a good amount of training, demos, forums, documentation, and video tutorials for the data storage solutions? What is the learning curve to set up, configure, and maintain the data management system?
  • Does the vendor provide maintenance, support, and configuration assistance?
  • Does the storage provider offer analytic, monitoring, and alerting tools?
  • What do other customers say about the company, their products, and their customer service?

Other factors to consider can include the contents of any Service level agreements (SLAs), the effect of the data storage offering on the environment, and what sort of integrations and third-party solutions integrate with the hardware/software.

James Payne
James Payne

James Payne is a writer, editor and content strategist with more than 20 years of experience. In addition to writing about all things tech, in his free time James writes adult horror short stories and novels, as well as fantasy novels and fiction for young adults.

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