The 2020 Coldago file storage research map shows VAST Data promoted to the Leaders’ segment, leapfrogging WekaIO, which moves from Specialist to Challenger status.
The 2020 edition surveys 31 vendors and looks at HPC and enterprise file storage vendors and their products from technology and architecture viewpoints.
Report author Philippe Nicolas comments: “File storage is a very active category [with] continued adoption of parallel file systems and fast scale-out NAS for a variety of scientific and technical to commercial use cases.
Coldago positions and ranks file storage vendors in a 4-column 2D space, defined by two axes; execution and capabilities vs vision and strategy. The columns are labelled from the left Niche, Specialists, Challengers and Leaders.
The seven leaders in the 2020 report are DDN, Dell, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage, Qumulo and VAST Data, as can be seen in the chart below.
A comparison with the 2019 map shows that there have been substantial moves rightwards and upwards in 2020.
The five 2019 Niche vendors have all moved out, leaving an empty column. The 2020 Specialists’ column is crowded, with new entrants such as CTera, Cohesity, Hammerspace, Panzura and Softiron contributing to the melee as well as the arrivals from the Niche segment.
The near-empty Challenger’s column of 2019 now features Hitachi Vantara, Quantum, and WekaIO – all moved in from the Specialists’ column, – and new entrant Nasuni.
So what’s in store for 2021? “Composable or disaggregation architecture should continue to land on the market,” Nicolas writes. “We also see a shared-everything model to complement share-nothing, it should be more visible [and] fueled by NVMe-oF. NAS, as industry file sharing standards, will be ubiquitous again with some interesting extensions like NFS-over-RDMA. … NAS and S3 access to the same data becomes a must.”
He also suggests “HPC storage will penetrate even more the commercial sector and application with enterprises adopting this model to solve big data challenges connected to GPU-based compute farms.”
