2017 North American Data Storage & Management Technology Innovation Award
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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 ......................................................................................... 10
Future Business Value ......................................................................................... 10
Decision Support Matrix ...................................................................................... 11
Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices ................................................................................................................. 12
The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards ..................... 13
Research Methodology ........................................................................................ 13
About Frost & Sullivan .............................................................................................. 13
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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
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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.
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.
Source: Reduxio Systems
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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
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
Source: Reduxio Systems
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 9 9 9.0
Competitor 2 8 7 7.5
Competitor 3 7 6 6.5
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.
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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
Low
Low High
Fu
ture B
usin
ess V
alu
e
Technology Attributes
Reduxio Systems
Competitor 2
Competitor 3
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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 best-practice 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
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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
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 http://www.frost.com.
360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN
THE CHAOS
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