Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage
Vendors or products added in this year’s report may indicate a change in the market, change in evaluation criteria, or change of focus by the vendor.
Vendors or products dropped from one year to the next may indicate a change in the market, change in evaluation criteria, or change of focus by the vendor.
The markets for distributed file systems and object storage have merged. The distinctions between the two segments are blurring, and buyers are already treating it as one market and requiring both file and object access for unstructured datasets. The most innovative vendors now offer file and object services on a common data store, typically a key-value store. The challenges with managing unstructured data are expanding from scale, performance or availability to include cyber resilience, data management, hybrid cloud, single platform for file and object workloads and storage-as-a-service.
A: We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.