Pure Storage is rated highest in Gartner’s 2020 primary arrays Magic Quadrant (MQ), overtaking NetApp, last year’s front runner.
Gartner defines primary arrays as all-flash or hybrid flash and disk on-premises storage arrays, that deliver block services (structured data workloads) and possibly file and object access.
Now for the Blocks & Files standard MQ explainer. The magic quadrant is defined by axes labelled ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’, and split into four squares tagged ‘visionaries’, ‘niche players’, ‘challengers’ and ‘leaders’.
The 2020 primary arrays MQ Leaders’ box is split into two groups, with IBM moving up from the trailing leaders to join Pure, NetApp, Dell and HPE in the, umm, leading leaders.
Notable changes include Inspur moving up from niche players to challengers. Oracle has fallen back in the niche players box.
Five vendors have dropped out of the 2020 MQ. They are Western Digital, which sold its IntelliFlash line to DDN, NEC, Infortrend, Synology and Kaminario (now rebranded as Silk.) Gartner’s MQ criteria for inclusion require the supplier to provide on-premises arrays, and this criteria excludes Silk, which has morphed into a software-only vendor
To merit inclusion in the MQ, suppliers must also have generated more than $50m in sales revenue over the past year. This may explain the exit of NEC, Infortrend and Synology. It could also account for the non-appearance of VAST Data and StorONE, which might otherwise have been expected to appear in the visionaries box
Gartner analysts list three strategic planning assumptions:
- By 2025, 50 per cent or more of enterprises will have moved to an OPEX storage consumption model.
- By 2025, 20 per cent or more enterprises will be using NVMe-oF. Just five per cent use it currently.
- By 2023, at least 20 per cent of enterprises will be using cloud storage management tools to link their arrays to the public cloud for backup and disaster recovery.
Could it be Magic (Quadrant)?
Here is the 2020 primary array Magic Quadrant, kindly made available by Infinidat.
And, for comparison, here is last year’s primary array MQ;
The green diagonal represents a balance of completeness of vision and the ability to execute.
