Report:

Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage

Top Vendor Products for Primary Storage in 2023

• Dell Technologies
• Hitachi Vantara
• HPE
• Huawei
• IBM
• Infinidat
• NetApp
• Pure Storage

Primary Storage Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Dell Technologies - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Dell Technologies is one of the few vendors in this market that can offer a full stack of infrastructure solutions, along with a comprehensive set of product capabilities to address all primary storage market segments.
  • APEX Data Storage Services provides flexibility in deployment locations, and offers either self-managed or Dell-managed operations with support for all major use cases.
  • Dell's cyber vault enables customers to do forensics, analysis and surgical recovery from a secured copy in an operational, air-gapped vault in case of a cyberattack.

  Cons:

  • Dell has four different block storage products with different feature sets, drive types (all-flash or hybrid) and types of cloud support, making it complex for Dell prospects to select the right product.
  • Dell's block storage presence in the public cloud is presently limited to AWS and is based on PowerFlex, which does not currently have as large of an installed base as PowerMax or PowerStore.
  • Dell lags the leading vendors in supporting QLC flash, which can enable higher capacities of solid-state drive (SSD) with lower costs and to reduce energy and carbon emissions.


• Hitachi Vantara - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Hitachi's VSP and VSS Block offerings can withstand multiple simultaneous hardware failures without disruption to data services, and offers a written 100% availability guarantee.
  • Hitachi VSP offerings are certified under the Carbon Footprint of Products (CFP) program and the VSP 5600 product has one of the lowest carbon footprint of only four kilograms of CO2 per terabyte per year.
  • Hitachi Vantara bundles Lumada software with its storage arrays to provide customers with a digital innovation platform that works with business data and IT field assets to collect, catalog, analyze, visualize and relay digital information.

  Cons:

  • Hitachi Vantara's AIOps lacks the ability to perform predictive workload simulations and placements.
  • Hitachi Vantara's support for public cloud hosted storage is currently limited to AWS Japan.
  • Hitachi Vantara does not have support for NVMe-oF over TCP, which will limit certain use case deployment options for customers who have made strategic investments in NVMe technologies.


• HPE - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • HPE GreenLake users have expressed high customer satisfaction, and the company is recognized among IT clients as a platform provider that leverages AIOps to deliver advancements in hybrid IT platform management that simplify onboarding, provisioning and storage asset life cycle management for STaaS.
  • HPE InfoSight is an integrated, application-centric, full-stack AIOps tool that provides proactive and predictive telemetry-based capabilities that underpin advanced IT SLA guarantees, including a standard written 100% data availability guarantee.
  • HPE Financial Services (HPEFS) provides flexible investment solutions, financing and storage asset management programs to free up capital and to streamline the transition to an as-a-service platform.

  Cons:

  • HPE GreenLake managed services will face operational challenges as it scales and as HPE supports a growing volume of large-scale IT platform demands.
  • There is the potential for confusion among channel partners and customers with HPE pricing as HPE shifts from selling products through traditional capex transaction methods to HPE GreenLake consumption-based, as-a-service offerings.
  • HPE Primera and HPE Alletra 9000 series arrays do not support NVMe-oF over TCP, which will limit deployment options from customer investments in NVMe technologies over Ethernet.


• Huawei - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Huawei has simplified and accelerated client onboarding through use of a discovery and AIOps tool that digitally discovers critical infrastructure elements for improved IT control.
  • Huawei provides the capability to schedule, dynamically adjust and maximize replication bandwidth in alignment with host workload activities, therein maximizing infrastructure benefits.
  • Huawei's ransomware detection solution includes a storage-network approach that integrates a rule-based AI model with frequent updates to the ML analysis, reducing overall threats within the storage environment.

  Cons:

  • Huawei lags other industry leaders in providing storage asset financing and management capabilities that simplify and streamline STaaS onboarding and time to value.
  • Huawei lacks a competitive SDS offering that enables hybrid cloud storage use cases with the following cloud infrastructure platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
  • Huawei OceanStor Dorado array series products do not support NVMe-oF over TCP, which will limit specific deployment options for customers who have made strategic investments in NVMe technologies over Ethernet.


• IBM - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • IBM's unique FlashCore Module technology enables leading price/performance and security advantages for the FlashSystem SSA portfolio.
  • IBM Storage Virtualize software data management flexibility extends across on-premises, in public cloud or in colocation to enable a standardized customer experience and services across platforms.
  • IBM Storage Sentinel's advanced scanning abilities for detection and prevention of ransomware provides a more cyber-storage-resilient capability beyond standard protection and recovery methods.

  Cons:

  • IBM's storage offerings, core technology capabilities and STaaS solution are relatively unknown outside of its customer base, making it difficult to assess the competitive value of its offerings for non-IBM customers.
  • Without IBM Storage Expert Care coverage, older products may see steep price increases or fee adjustments for extended support and maintenance.
  • IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud is limited in the number of storage nodes in each of the public cloud offerings, lagging some of the industry leaders in scale-out, linear performance.


• Infinidat - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Infinidat customers express a high level of satisfaction with its ease of use, technical support and professional services that are supported by a suite of service-level guarantees.
  • Infinidat excels at application consolidation, with petabyte (PB)-scale offerings in both hybrid and all-flash configurations, achieving favorable dollar per input/output (I/O) and dollar-per-watt returns that underpin compelling total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits.
  • Infinidat offers a variety of purchasing models, including capital expenditure (capex)-only, elastic pricing (a combination of operating expenditure [opex] and capex pricing) and FLX, a consumption-based STaaS offering.

  Cons:

  • Infinidat has limited geographic support for emerging markets, making it difficult for some multinational companies to evaluate services and support capabilities for long-term investments.
  • Infinidat's portfolio lacks a low-capacity (sub-250TB) offering and deduplication capabilities, limiting its appeal to some smaller customers and select workloads that benefit from deduplication.
  • Infinidat's new SDS InfuzeOS Cloud Edition is based on a single-node architecture, limiting its cloud-native scalability and resiliency attributes, and it is only currently available on AWS.


• NetApp - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • NetApp's storage operating system is designed to run on-premises, and in AWS, Azure and GCP, with the ability to tier and replicate between locations and manage them from a common SaaS-based control plane.
  • NetApp has mature and rich enterprise file services capabilities, making it a reliable unified storage offering.
  • NetApp's BlueXP is a centralized, AIOps-powered, SaaS-based management portal for NetApp's products across on-premises and cloud locations, with built-in capabilities for cloud migration, data classification, governance, protection and storage optimization.

  Cons:

  • Some NetApp customers have expressed concerns about ease of use and the quality of initial technical support.
  • Compared to its peer group, NetApp has had a limited rollout of financing and storage capitalization for STaaS channel initiatives, limiting on-premises capex to consumption customer deployment options
  • NetApp's portfolio can be complex and requires careful understanding of the trade-offs between the different products to select the right product for application and business requirements.


• Pure Storage - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Vertically integrated direct flash modules are tightly integrated with the Purity OS, enabling compelling economics at PB system capacities without compromising performance and reliability.
  • The company's Evergreen portfolio provides flexible consumption model options ranging from all-capex to all-opex, and a hybrid model in the middle, where hardware is capex and software is opex.
  • Customer experience is rated highly, as its ease of use and high service levels help reduce administration complexity and save costs.

  Cons:

  • Pure Storage's acquisition pricing on its high-end products and overall support fees are generally more expensive than competitive offerings, as a percentage of the initial array costs over a three-year period.
  • The company does not offer any cost-effective alternatives to hybrid storage below 250TB, where price is paramount and performance secondary.
  • Pure Storage lacks international presence in emerging countries, which could be problematic for customers demanding specific support and service needs.


• IEIT SYSTEMS - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • IEIT SYSTEMS is leveraging its captive NVMe SSD drive cost advantages by proactively offering to replace its clients with a mixed hard-disk and flash-installed base with the NVMe SSD drive.
  • IEIT SYSTEMS combines the AS13000 ICFS SDS product with the strength of its server business to create a price/performance cost advantage over competitive SDS offerings.
  • IEIT SYSTEMS clients cite cost-effective pricing and highly resilient storage as reasons to select its products over competing options.

  Cons:

  • IEIT SYSTEMS' view of the market and its roadmap are not aligned to customer needs outside of the primary China region in which they market and sell their products.
  • IEIT SYSTEMS lacks a competitive SDS offering for hybrid cloud storage solution for use in the three major public clouds (AWS, Azure and Google), making it tougher for end users to evaluate and assess their hybrid cloud platform strategy.
  • IEIT SYSTEMS' workload placement AIOps capabilities lag industry leaders for effective optimization and resource allocation across infrastructure, making it difficult for customers to achieve optimal resource utilization and cost efficiencies.


• DDN (Tintri) - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Application-level AIOps capabilities provide proactive workload classification and resource optimization that allows customers to substantially reduce storage administration costs.
  • Tintri offers a patented drive-by-drive expansion unit to minimize upfront capex and support costs, allowing customers to pay as they grow their capacity with very fine granularity.
  • Tintri Global Center provides a common provisioning and management capability that integrates its on-premises VMstore storage array with the TCE1000 SDS in Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing customers with a hybrid cloud modernization plan.

  Cons:

  • Tintri lags the primary storage market leaders in supporting as-a-service consumption plans with SLA guarantees, due to its lack of a product and set of offerings for an on-premises hybrid platform for centralized IT operations.
  • Tintri lags market competitors in not offering or supporting ransomware detection capabilities, only recovery from integrated backup support.
  • Tintri's TCE1000 SDS cloud engine lags leading competitive offerings in its breadth of public cloud options that it supports.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage, 18-Sep-2023, ID G00780941

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