Storage Products of the Year 2020

**NOTE: The deadline for entries has passed, and the entry form is closed. Check out the winners of the 2020 Storage Products of the Year awards.**

Users and vendors: Nominate your favorite or best products by filling out each of the fields in the 2020 entry form by Monday, Sept. 28, 2020, at 5:00 p.m. PDT. All questions must be answered on the form or the entry will be disqualified. For tips from our judges on submitting a product for consideration, click here. If you have problems with the form, contact us for guidance. Access the entry form here.

Details about submissions: All storage products qualify for entry if they were new or significantly upgraded and first shipped on or after Sept. 20, 2019, and before Sept. 21, 2020.

Your product should be entered in one of the following five categories:

• BACKUP AND DISASTER RECOVERY HARDWARE, SOFTWARE AND SERVICES. This category includes data protection hardware, backup software integrated with hardware appliances, tape libraries and drives, backup media, disk backup targets, and deduplication devices. It also covers backup and recovery software; cloud backup and recovery services; and on-premises backup and disaster recovery, snapshotting, replication and archiving products.
• DISK AND DISK SUBSYSTEMS. Entries in this category cover storage arrays and products available with flash storage, hard disk drives or a hybrid mixture. Products include flash and disk drive-based Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN arrays, NAS, multiprotocol systems, converged infrastructure products, disk controllers and caching appliances. Arrays in this category have all the software management and storage features integrated with the storage media, as opposed to software that can be run on any appliance.
• CLOUD STORAGE. Products must be able to run in the cloud with no dependencies on the underlying on-premises hardware. They include software that pools and centrally manages storage across servers or cloud object stores, cloud-native storage, file systems not tied to specific arrays, and gateway appliances for cloud backup and replication. These products can be available as software-only, installed on standard x86 server appliances or run in the cloud.
• STORAGE SYSTEM AND APPLICATION SOFTWARE. This category includes SAN management and storage resource management software, as well as third-party analytics, performance monitoring, configuration management, provisioning, data reduction and other storage-related software products that are not dependent on a specific storage array or device.
• HYPER-CONVERGED AND COMPOSABLE INFRASTRUCTURES. This category includes hyper-converged systems and software that combine storage, compute and virtualization resources for management as a single system through a common tool set. It also includes composable systems and software that use a unifying API to disaggregate and manage shared pools of physical compute, storage and network fabric IT resources. These products treat these resources as services so admins don't have to physically configure hardware to support specific applications.

Fill out a separate entry form for each product. Winning products will be highlighted in both the February 2021 issue of Storage magazine and on SearchStorage in February. You can only submit through this form. Do not send hard copies of submissions. Do not send submissions via email. Note the character limits per field. Character counts include spaces.

Who judges the entries? Storage magazine and SearchStorage editors as well as other storage industry experts will judge the entries.

Entries are judged on the following criteria: innovation, performance, ease of integration into the environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality, and value. Click here to learn more about how products are evaluated.