Gartner’s 2021 Hyperconverged Magic Quadrant: Leaders unchanged, bye-bye DataCore, hello Visionary StorMagic

All the action is centred down on the bottom-left in Gartner’s latest hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software magic quadrant (MQ).

This annual MQ rates HCI suppliers on low-to-high “completeness of vision“ and “ability to execute” axes, defining a rectangular space divided into four squares: Niche Players with low vision and executive ability, Visionaries with more vision but low executive ability, Challengers with higher executive ability but low vision, and Leaders with high vision and high ability to execute. It’s a quick guide to supplier choices for Gartner clients, backed up by a separate and more thorough critical capabilities report.

This year’s HCI MQ has no change in the Challengers and Leaders quadrants, the former being empty and the latter the domain of just two players: Nutanix and VMware, and their respective positions are effectively unchanged. Nutanix is maybe closer to the ideal balanced execution ability/vision line.

Down in the bottom left, we wave goodbye to DataCore, which has been ejected this year. We see Quantum inheriting the acquired Pivot3 slot and moving to the left and downwards. StorMagic, with its vSAN product, moves into the Visionaries quadrant, which pleases it mightily. An announcement said: “This is the fourth consecutive year that StorMagic has been included in the report, and we are incredibly proud to be recognised, for the first time ever, as a ‘Visionary.’”

You can get a complementary copy of this 2021 HCI MQ from the StorMagic website.