For manufacturers or vendors wishing to have their products covered and reviewed by a publication, there are often many ways to make that happen. Many larger publications require a cash payment to review a product, where others either have implied or required event sponsorships, advertisement buys or the like to get coverage. StorageReview is different, especially in the enterprise IT space. Our editorial team cares more about creating great content that using content as part of the business model. For that reason we don’t charge to have a product reviewed or otherwise written about on StorageReview.
To be fair, we do accelerate reviews for companies who are site sponsors, companies who give StorageReview exclusive access to products or those who participate in our lab. To be clear, sponsorships and advertising buys mean two different things here. Advertising consists of the ads you see throughout the site. Sponsors are very different and work with StorageReview in a more integrated way, commonly donating extensive amounts of hardware to our test lab for use in reviews, helping fuel our independent review process. Lab services include in-depth access to our growing list of industry tests, help replicating our testing scenarios in remote environments, testing of pre-production hardware or on-site visits for testing/validation purposes. Many companies use these services as an extension of their own labs, having us evaluate and analyze differentials between hardware revisions or software updates. Those companies gain priority status in out review queue, but receive no benefit in terms of more favorable content. Additional information on our sponsorship program is available here.
On the consumer side, StorageReview aims to keep review content relevant and meaningful for our readers. We also use our extensive knowledge of products in the enterprise space to introduce new benchmarking or testing ideas in the consumer market. As a result, we only cover hard drives, the most popular SSD brands, and aim to bring coverage of interesting accessories and software when appropriate.
With very distinct target markets and vastly different testing methodologies, we operate two testing environments. For consumer products we use an off the shelf HP Z640 workstation commonly available in the small business or enterprise market. These platforms allow us to test products under realistic conditions, instead of expensive overclocked platforms that not all buyers or readers have access to.
Our primary testing environment is the StorageReview Enterprise Test Lab, designed to handle everything from large-scale storage arrays down to single SSDs or hard drives. In our lab we currently partner with many vendors who provide equipment such as servers, storage, power conditioning and rack-space, networking and more, keeping our testing infrastructure updated and highly relevant to our readership.
Want StorageReview to evaluate your products? Contact us now to discuss in more detail.
