NetApp, Cohesity, and Nutanix have been named Leaders and out-performers from amongst 15 vendors participating in the GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Scale-Out File Systems Radar report.
Update: Max Mortillaro tweet added. Jan 6.
Such Radar reports evaluate suppliers’ product’s technical capabilities and feature sets against a set of 14 criteria and evaluation metrics to produce a Radar graphic.This is a circular area divided into concentric inner Leader, mid-way Challenger and outer New Entrant rings modified by by two orthogonal axes, Maturity vs Innovation and Feature Play vs Platform Play, providing four quadrants overlaying the circles. Suppliers are also rated on their speed of development across the chart.
This report has Nutanix Files and Cohesity, with its SmartFiles offering apparently surpassing Dell EMC’s PowerScale/Isilon offering.
Challengers are Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, Qumulo and VAST Data (an out-performer), which are moving into the Leaders’ space, along with Commvault, Hammerspace, Quobyte and Softiron who are not shown as progressing into the Leader’s ring. The new entrants are OSNexus, Quantum, Red Hat, and Scality.
DDN, Hitachi Vantara, Panasas, Red Hat, StorageCraft, SUSE and WEKA don’t appear, as a comparison with last year’s edition of this report shows:
VAST Data has gone backwards, from Leader in 2020 to Challenger in 2021, as have Commvault and Quobyte. The evaluation criteria must have changed, which also renders the direction and speed of movement arrows on the diagram unreliable. Vendor directions of movement in the 2020 edition often do not correlate with vendor positions in the 2021 Radar edition – witness Hammerspace and Scality as other examples.
In fact Scality’s 2020 rating, as a fairly mature, mid-way feature-vs-platform with Challenger status, contrasts vividly with its 2021 rating as a less mature New Entrant (!) with a pronounced feature play. Quantum likewise has moved from 2020 Challenger to 2021 New Entrant. The 2020 report author was Enrico Signoretti while the 2021 Radar report is written by him plus Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman.
Co-author Max Mortillaro tweeted: “There has been a significant change in this year’s key criteria, which has led to different positioning compared to the 2020 report. Also, some of the vendors listed as missing were published in the sister report for high-performance scale out :)”
