The 2015 Modern Infrastructure Award Winners

The Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards recognize the top cloud and data center products and technologies making a difference for IT shops.

The award-winning tools and services in essential areas of technology that Modern Infrastructure covers help run enterprise businesses with efficiency and insight -- whether used inside the data center or out.

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Modern Infrastructure 2015 Impact Awards

Click through to see the top providers of cloud services, converged infrastructure, DevOps and cloud management, data protection and software-defined infrastructure, and the best bright new idea that promises to make a big impact on data centers.

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Nutanix NX-3460 deemed best converged infrastructure

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Nutanix NX-3460 deemed best converged infrastructureIT organizations crave lower priced, seamlessly integrated server platforms purchased from and supported by a single vendor. Of all the competitors, Nutanix NX-3460 is the preferred choice by Modern Infrastructure readers and the Impact Awards panel of judges for best converged infrastructure product.

Nutanix converged infrastructure brings virtualized servers together with storage and networking under one management platform for enterprise IT workloads. The Nutanix NX-3460 is a four-node deployment of the NX-3060. Each node runs with Dual Intel Ivy Bridge E5-2680v2 processors, two 400 GB solid-state drives and four 1 TB hard disk drives for storage, up to 512 GB of configurable memory and network ports for 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 10/100 BASE-T networking.

Voters valued the true integration of the compute, storage and networking tiers, coupled with the product's building block design, over all else. The latter capability gives first-time users the option of testing CI with smaller deployments before committing to full-blown, large cluster installations.

"We found the [Nutanix] one-stop shop products to be very well thought out. I like that I can build a data center that scales vertically and horizontally by just adding another block," said one reader.

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SimpliVity OmniCube rides storage-friendly reputation

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SimpliVity OmniCube rides storage-friendly reputationSimpliVity continues to win over new fans among users and experts, and is an honorable mention winner for the Impact Awards in best converged infrastructure.

Some voters like the SimpliVity OmniCube CN-3000's ability to neatly package storage and compute capabilities in one form factor, and seamlessly add data protection and IT management all in a single management pane. OmniCube CN-3000 is a 2U package with x86 architecture, which users can connect to scale up over standard Ethernet.

Traditional data center architectures that separate compute, networking and storage present organizations with a number of technical and business flaws, said one reader from a cloud services provider. He was stuck until he explored the possibilities that a converged product could offer.

"We talked to all the [convergence] players for several months and for what we needed, SimpliVity addressed nearly 100% of our pain points while the others addressed only parts of them," he wrote.

Another voter noted SimpliVity OmniCube's storage-friendly features: "[It's] built from the ground up with storage optimization in mind!"

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Scale Computing HC3 recognized for SMB focus

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Scale Computing HC3 recognized for SMB focus

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Scale Computing wins an Honorable Mention in the Impact Awards' best converged infrastructure category.

Most converged infrastructure vendors chase the big bucks in the enterprise, but Scale Computing makes no apologies about its laser focus on small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Judging from user and expert feedback, Scale Computing's dedication appears to have paid off.

"So many solutions are enterprise focused but Scale is just the opposite, and there's something to be admired in that," said one expert. "They have the best technology, not just for SMBs, but many larger shops as well. People talk about a data center in a box, but Scale's really is."

Scale Computing HC3 HyperCore v5 also wins rave reviews for its price/performance and technical support.

"They are killing it in the SMB space because they are giving those users what they value most: good tech, good performance, excellent support and an aggressive price. It's almost a no-brainer for SMB these days," wrote one reader.

Others noted its speedy installation: "Not everything can be set up and deployed in less than 30 minutes. Scale does it with ease," one voter said.

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Amazon cloud computing dominates public cloud

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Amazon cloud computing dominates public cloud

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Amazon Web Services is virtually synonymous with public cloud, which voters recognized with the Modern Infrastructure Impact Award for best cloud computing provider.

While mega vendors Google and Microsoft continue to make tremendous strides in garnering potential customer attention and bolstering product portfolios, Amazon cloud computing on AWS remains one step ahead of the competition and doesn't appear ready to loosen its stranglehold on the market any time soon.

Far from resting on its laurels, Amazon estimated it released 500 new services for AWS in 2014 alone. Impact Awards voters cited this range of services, relative low cost and ability to deliver on promises as reasons for choosing AWS cloud computing. They used terms like "best" and "the standard" to describe its offering.

Many of the features that AWS competitors release with great fanfare have been available from Amazon for years, and the platform has an unrivaled set of partners in its public cloud ecosystem.

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Google cloud computing services gain enterprise favor

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Google cloud computing services gain enterprise favor

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Google cloud computing services have a reputation as being developer-centric, but the deep-pocketed company hit the accelerator in 2014 by bolstering Compute Engine, its infrastructure-as-a-service offering, and making earnest attempts to lure enterprise customers away from AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Google Cloud Platform impressed enterprises, earning Honorable Mention in the Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards cloud computing provider category.

"Google probably wins the 'most improved' title," said one judge.

One voter noted that "Google makes great cloud products at competitive prices and communicates well with customers."

Another called out Google's enterprise capabilities, saying, "It is rare that companies provide tools that can scale at the Google level."

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Rackspace cloud hosting turnaround garners honorable mention

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Rackspace cloud hosting turnaround garners honorable mention

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Rackspace Hosting went from vultures circling in the first half of 2014 to taking an Honorable Mention in the Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards for cloud computing providers.

Experts speculated that the company would be sold because it would never compete with the likes of AWS in public cloud. But the San Antonio-based vendor ultimately opted to stay independent, and its stock is rising. There was a rebrand around managed cloud and the addition of a series of new capabilities, including bare-metal cloud and managed tools for Microsoft and Google applications.

"Nothing appears to be too big or small to be done," said one voter.

"They say 'Fanatical Support' ... and they do it!" noted another. Support and communication came up as major areas of strength for Rackspace cloud hosting during the voting.

"Pricing is good and the support cannot be beat," another voter said.

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VMware SDN offering leads software-defined market

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VMware SDN offering leads software-defined market

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Congratulations to VMware on its NSX software, which beat out a diverse field of products to win the Modern Infrastructure Impact Award for software-defined infrastructure.

The challenge with a category for "software-defined" products is that there are so many competing -- or perhaps confused -- views about what the term really means. For their purposes, judges determined that "software-defined" should mean enabling an application to control its own resources.

NSX's software-defined networking (SDN) abstracts both the control plane and data plane, allowing users to more easily create flexible, agile system deployments. It works in much the same way that server virtualization abstracts processing power. VMware NSX reduces the time to deploy complex multi-tiered networks by removing manual configuration tasks and applying security and network services to virtual machines via policies. With VMware SDN in place, the underlying physical network is a simple packet-forwarding backplane and administrators create, provision and manage logical networks atop it.

"VMware NSX comes in with perhaps the canonical example of 'virtualized' software-defined infrastructure. In fact, NSX appears to be a key, if not the key, enabler to making productive use of any kind of VMware-based cloud implementation," one judge said.

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Maxta MxSP lauded for software-defined storage products

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Maxta MxSP lauded for software-defined storage products

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Maxta's MxSP v2.0 was highly praised by Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards voters for its innovative approach to software-defined storage. Maxta's software-only option replaces a traditional storage area network by pooling storage on standard x86 servers.

"I chose this product as it is software-only and has all the features you expect from a hardware solution," said one reader.

What made Maxta stand out among other software-defined storage products was its ease of use and its support for multiple hypervisors.

"[MxSP is] very simple to install and administer. [It has] excellent performance and minimum training required. [MxSP can be] up and running in a couple of hours," another reader said.

"[It's] a very promising approach in the upcoming hyper-converged space," said another of Maxta's place in the emerging market.

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Users tout LogicMonitor DevOps, cloud management tool

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Users tout LogicMonitor DevOps, cloud management tool

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It's refreshing to hear about a monitoring suite that installs easily and is comprehensive, yet customizable. Add great support and a cost-effective hosted software-as-a-service model, and you've got a Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards winner for best DevOps and cloud management tool.

LogicMonitor is a cloud-based IT monitoring suite that Modern Infrastructure readers called out for its impressive ability to help them get up and running in a matter of minutes.

The speed with which LogicMonitor discovers new environments is "kind of scary," said Dale Rodriguez, a product manager at a managed hosting provider. "I was able to get 400 systems online in a couple of hours, compared with a week for other systems," he said.

LogicMonitor puts development and operations teams onto the same dashboards and alerts to improve communication and speed delivery. Its platform includes AutoDiscovery, a feature that automates discovery, configuration and management of monitoring.

And LogicMonitor's status as a cloud-based rather than on-premises tool is an asset, not a liability, voters said.

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SaltStack cloud management tool lauded for ease of use

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SaltStack cloud management tool lauded for ease of use

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SaltStack Enterprise 3.1 received an Honorable Mention for the best DevOps and cloud management Impact Award, thanks to ease of use.

When some IT pros first try configuration management, things don't always go well. "I tried [other cloud management tools] but I couldn't get them up and running," said one reader, especially ones based on general-purpose programming languages.

SaltStack uses Python, a high-level programming language beloved by systems administrators. SaltStack also works well in Linux and Windows environments -- a must for enterprise shops.

Compared with other cloud management tools, "Salt's the stand-out candidate for supportability through the community." And while it's new, the open source community around Salt is large and active, readers said.

It's also "simpler than the others, but packs a lot of power," said one voter. And another noted that it's "Linux-y and fast."

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Chef 12 brings versatility to DevOps

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Chef 12 brings versatility to DevOps

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Chef 12 proved worthy of an Honorable Mention for best DevOps and cloud management, thanks to its support and versatility, said Modern Infrastructure voters.

Chef is versatile due to its use of Ruby, and it supports a wide range of platforms and a vibrant, enthusiastic open source community. These days, Chef users love it for its pioneering work around DevOps and orchestration.

"Chef leads the charge toward infrastructure-as-code, with great support for testing, continuous deployment and reuse," said Zachary Stevens, co-founder of Elastera, a U.K. managed services provider. "They're taking the best of what's come out of the dev community and applying it to ops with test-driven infrastructure development."

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Code42 CrashPlan Enterprise protects data

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Code42 CrashPlan Enterprise protects data

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IT professionals are taking endpoint data protection seriously. And they're turning to Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards winner Code42 CrashPlan Enterprise Endpoint Backup 3.6.2.

CrashPlan protects critical corporate data saved far from the data center on PCs and laptops at the edge of a corporate network, without disrupting end users. The product gives IT governance and control while enabling easy access and unlimited file size.

Ohio State University's IT department used to make users save files to a networked home directory, which it would periodically back up via script. That system was less than perfect, "and we were very exposed," said Tim Winningham, IT projects manager for its College of Arts and Sciences. "We decided we weren't going to ignore people anymore."

Like the majority of Modern Infrastructure readers voting in the best data protection category, Winningham selected Code42 CrashPlan Enterprise Endpoint Backup. Its virtues include ease of administration, flexible backup targets and support for a broad range of devices, to name a few. Readers also like that files can be saved locally or to the cloud -- a must in professional, mobile environments.

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HotLink DR Express keeps data protection simple

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HotLink DR Express keeps data protection simple

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HotLink DR Express 4.0 took home an Honorable Mention Impact Award for best data protection product.

Most IT pros agree that disaster recovery (DR) is hard to do. But it doesn't have to be if you have HotLink DR Express 4.0. It is a plug-in for VMware vCenter that provides backup/replication plus DR by recovering VMs within minutes of a failure on Amazon Web Services.

"We got it running in a short morning and have been protected ever since," one voter said.

HotLink DR Express is "effective, simple, quick to deploy ... and most importantly cost-effective," said one reader, who had never mustered DR before. "That allowed us to protect all our VMs -- not only the mission-critical ones."

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Flux7 crowned best AWS partner

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Flux7 crowned best AWS partner

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Flux7 has made a big impact since its founding in 2013, and voters named it the best AWS consulting partner in 2014.

Flux7 Labs brings full-stack expertise and DevOps knowledge to companies that want to take advantage of public cloud computing for app development or hosting, or cloud infrastructure that complies with existing regulations.

"We wanted to build a more scalable and secure infrastructure in [Amazon Web Services] that could handle high traffic," said one voter. "Flux7 was able to put a solution in place with automation and AWS best practices, while tailoring it to the specific needs and workflows of the development team, building tools specific to our requirements."

Customers were also impressed by Flux7 Labs' current knowledge of the cloud market and the competitive cloud offerings that might match AWS' services.

The company's skills are especially prized when it comes to automation and scripting, and it also specializes in big data analytics.

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Cloud Technology Partners' expertise earns honorable mention

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Cloud Technology Partners' expertise earns honorable mention

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Honorable mention in the Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards best AWS consulting partner category goes to Cloud Technology Partners.

Knowledgeable people are the backbone of any consulting organization, and Cloud Technology Partners (CTP) earned stellar remarks from voters about the people they've worked with there.

"CTP has the best team by far," said one voter. "They have deep expertise on AWS, great certifications and the ability to handle the hard stuff. They were great to work with."

Another voter had this to say: "CTP is the best cloud consultancy organization I have had the pleasure to work with. The people are top-notch and enjoy their work."

CTP, founded in 2011, is based in Cambridge, Mass. and offers both consulting services and software it calls PaaSLane, which assists customers with application readiness before a cloud migration.

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Upsite Technologies' bright idea for cool servers

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Upsite Technologies' bright idea for cool servers

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If your organization has a data center, chances are good you spend a lot of energy keeping it cool. That drives some IT operations off to a colocation provider or the cloud and others to cooling upgrades, which can be a huge effort. Unless you go modular.

Modern Infrastructure readers selected Upsite Technologies AisleLok Modular Containment for this year's Bright Idea Award, which recognizes a brand-new technology product.

The idea behind containment is to keep the cold air pumped in by a data center cooling system separate from the hot air exhausted by servers. That prevents hot and cold air from mixing so that the cooling systems don't have to work as hard. Most data centers that use containment were designed for it from the get-go. And for those that weren't, it's a difficult and expensive retrofit.

Not so with Upsite Technology's AisleLok Modular Containment system. According to readers, this after-market containment system looks like it's a breeze to set up. AisleLok's secret sauce is its "clever design and features, including magnetic attachments and quick, tool-less installation," wrote one reader. It is applied on a per-rack basis, and can be easily moved and reused in different parts of the data center. The containment it provides helps lower data center temperatures by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the company claims.

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