Gartner notes a significant proportion of vendors placed in the Magic Quadrant for object storage and scale-out NAS with little recognition. What is the market like?
Gone are the heavyweights, object storage and NAS players scale do they suffer from a lack of notoriety? Almost half of the providers classified in the Magic Quadrant for this market segment are entitled to comment.
For some, like VAST Data and WEKA, the observation is global. For others, it applies only to certain geographic identifiers. For example, for Cloudian in South America and Asia Pacific. A region where, on the contrary, Inspur and Huawei have settled… without developing significantly elsewhere.
The remark also applies to two of the “leaders” of the quadrant. In this case Qumulo and Scality. In the case of the latter, less in absolute terms than compared to the main competitors. On that basis, the customer base appears small and relatively concentrated – in North America and EMEA.
Gartner evaluates vendors on two axes. A forward-looking (“vision”) focused on strategies (sectoral, geographic, commercial, marketing, product, etc.). The other focuses on the ability to effectively respond to demand (“Execution”: customer experience, pre-sales performance, product/service quality, etc.).
The suppliers ranked in the quadrant are arranged on the “Vision” axis in the following order:
| salesperson | Creation Date | |
| 1 | Qumulo | 2012 |
| 2 | Dell Technologies | 2016 |
| 3 | WEKA | 2013 |
| 4 | PureStorage | 2009 |
| 5 | Nutanix | 2009 |
| 6 | scaling | 2009 |
| 7 | NetApp | 1992 |
| 8th | IBM | 1911 |
| 9 | quantum | 1980 |
| 10 | red hat | 1993 |
| 11 | cohesion | 2013 |
| 12 | VAST data | 2016 |
| 13 | cloudy | 2011 |
| 14 | Hitachi Vantara | 2017 |
| fifteen | Huawei | 1987 |
| 16 | incentive | [1945[1945 |
| 17 | NMS | 2007 |
On the execution axis:
| salesperson | |
| 1 | Dell Technologies |
| 2 | IBM |
| 3 | Huawei |
| 4 | Hitachi Vantara |
| 5 | PureStorage |
| 6 | VAST data |
| 7 | cloudy |
| 8th | Qumulo |
| 9 | scaling |
| 10 | NetApp |
| 11 | Nutanix |
| 12 | incentive |
| 13 | WEKA |
| 14 | red hat |
| fifteen | NMS |
| 16 | quantum |
| 17 | cohesion |
Dell, IBM: Dependencies on specific building blocks
In addition to Scality, the field of “leaders” includes Dell Technologies, IBM, Pure Storage and Qumulo. As last year.
As last year, Dell claims a good point on the size of its installed base – which guides its product developments all the better. Gartner also commends the data services built into the APEX portfolio. And the level of integration with the American group’s x86 servers.
The “off-the-shelf” model has its limits, at least with the PowerScale offering: its users tend to have more integration problems than with domestic appliances dedicated. Dell doesn’t have its own parallel file system (it relies on partners). It also lacks an exploitable file offering on AWS or Azure.
As in 2021, IBM enjoys favorable esteem for its NAS Spectrum Scale Brick. And for the management tool Spectrum Discover. The same does not apply to the “as a service” part. So much for the lack of a STaaS own brand than by depending on partners for managed file offerings offered on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The customer experience is also below average at Spectrum Scale as well as at COS (Cloud Object Storage).
Strengths that endure… and weaknesses that endure
Ease of installation and operation remains a strength of PureStorage. The flexibility of the associated consumption model domestic appliances FlashBlade is another. The same thing for the investment in the AIOps Brick (Pure1), which was already commended last year.
Less positive opinion of Gartner on the pricing, especially for support, “more expensive than competitors”. The American company also points out that Pure Storage has few customers with more than 1PB of raw capacity.
Usually Qumulo stands out again in customer satisfaction. Its cloud architecture also earns it a good point. And unlike Pure Storage, the American conglomerate has a large customer base that stores more than 1PB.
Aside from the notoriety issue (which is related to both Qumulo’s size and the depth of its catalogue), Gartner notes one room for progress in the partnership with HPE: integration with InfoSight, which currently limits the ability to include SLAs on the file provide part. Another point of vigilance: the offering on Azure is not available in the EMEA region.
At the side of scalingwe stand out again for the file/object unification and the quality of the technical support. In addition to pre-sales support and a history of massive deployments across most lines of business.
Apart from the question of the customer base mentioned, the range of files does not belong to the weak points workload require low latency. The RING solution also involves a certain learning curve. The complexity of deployment and management has been a pain point for the past year.
Illustrative photo © KanawatTH – Adobe Stock