In the second edition of the Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Award for NAS systems, top NAS vendors like Network Appliance and EMC scored well, but BlueArc emerged as the surprise winner.

BlueArc Corp., an emerging vendor that has toiled in relative obscurity since 1998, steps into the spotlight in our 2007 Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Award NAS survey by beating out larger, more recognized competitors and winning the enterprise award. We spoke with many enthusiastic BlueArc Titan SiliconServer users, which suggests the victory isn't a statistical anomaly. The result has ended Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Corp.'s string of victories for enterprise storage Quality Awards at three. While HDS' enterprise NAS entry led the pack last year--and its enterprise storage arrays have taken top honors twice--there wasn't a high enough number of HDS survey respondents for consideration this year.