Cohesity, VAST arrive in Gartner’s object MQ

Gartner’s latest Distributed Files and Object Storage Magic Quadrant lists two newcomers, “visionary” Cohesity and “challenger” VAST Data.

Update: VAST Data statement added. 24 Ocober 2022.  And, courtesy of Pure Storage, the full report can be downloaded here and it is ungated. 28 Oct 2022.

There were 15 suppliers in the 2021 report, when Pure Storage was promoted to ‘Leaders’ box status, and both Nutanix and Weka entered for the first time. Now we have 17 suppliers with Cohesity and VAST making their first appearance. Here are the previous two year’s distributed files and object storage MQs: 

MQ before Cohesity and VAST

And the new one:

MQ with Cohesity and VAST

Cohesity CMO Lynn Lucas said in a statement: “Our customers love SmartFiles as a great way to optimize cost, scale, and efficiency for their unstructured data… SmartFiles allows [customers] to manage, secure, and defend their data with next-level intelligence. We believe this recognition from Gartner underscores the value and innovation that the Cohesity platform provides to customers looking to simplify unstructured data management.”

Based on a balance between Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, Dell leads the Leaders’ box with IBM positioned in second place and Pure in third (Pure was fifth behind Scality a year ago. Now it has overtaken Scality and fourth placed Qumulo).

The SmartFiles product is based on Cohesity’a scale-out Span File System, which can receive and present files using NFS, SMB and S3 protocols at the same time, and tier files to the cloud. 

Cohesity is also ranked as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.

VAST Data has a lower Completeness of Vision score than Cohesity but a higher Ability to Execute. It leads the businesses in the Challengers box based on the balance between Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. Huawei, Hitachi Vantara and Cloudian are the other Challengers.

Co-founder and CMO Jeff Denworth said: “Today, we achieved a major milestone in our mission by landing on the 2022 Gartner File and Object Magic Quadrant. Our debut is particularly notable because of our placement… where we’ve landed the highest on the quadrant of any new vendor since the inception of the MQ. … We are out-executing with a plan built on a vision that is both anchored on the future of computing as well as pragmatic in terms of its potential to be executed upon.”

DDN and Inspur are the two Niche Players.

“Visionary” NetApp has failed to break into the Leaders’ quadrant this year, and Nutanix has joined the quadrant close to the boundary of the Leaders’ box. Weka and Quantum are visionaries still, as is Red Hat, acquired by IBM yet listed separately.

MQ explainer

As we wrote 12 months ago, the files and object storage MQ is produced once a year and features the  well-known Leaders, Challengers, Niche Players and Visionaries quadrants in a chart with Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision axes. Suppliers are scored on various attributes of these two concepts and then placed in the MQ diagram according to their summed and weighted scores, with a presence towards the top right being desirable. That area has the highest ability to execute and completeness of vision.