Coldago Research: Map 2020 for File Storage

Coldago Research, a market research and analysis firm, releases the 2020 edition of its Map for File Storage (36 pages, $4,490).

This report studied the market and players since the previous edition, 12 months ago, with 31 players, with a few changes since the 2019 edition. The Map couples enterprise and/or the HPC file storage vendors with the idea to compare companies and not products and organize in 4 categories: Leaders, Challengers, Specialists and Niches.

The 31 players are Atos, CTera Networks, DDN, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, Hammerspace, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nasuni, NEC, NetApp, Oracle, Panasas, Panzura, Pure Storage, Oracle, Quantum, Qumulo, Quobyte, SoftIron, StorageCraft, SUSE, ThinkParQ, Vast Data, Veritas Technologies and WekaIO.

“We studied 31 players in multiple dimensions and built different lists,” said Philippe Nicolas, analyst. “We elect 7 leaders: Dell, DDN, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage, Qumulo and Vast Data, we also detect 4 BlitzScalers¹: Pure Storage, Qumulo, VAST Data and WekaIO with very interesting trajectories and finally establish a list of vendors to watch with Cohesity, Hammerspace, Nasuni, Pure Storage, Quantum, Qumulo, Quobyte, VAST Data and WekaIO.”

Rapid comments about the 7 leaders:

DDN: IT active in the enterprise and HPC markets with a rich portfolio coming from various acquisitions and long time development. It is represented by ExaScaler fueled by the parallel file system Lustre and addresses other needs with Tintri, IntelliFlash and Nexenta.
Dell Technologies: IT refreshes its portfolio with PowerScale but also PowerStore as an unified solution. In the HPC side, IT chooses to distribute Lustre, BeeGFS, IBM Spectrum Scale and WekaIO.
IBM: Essentially represented by Spectrum Scale, we choose to include Red Hat with Big Blue as the company is able to integrate and deploy any of these products such as Ceph, Gluster and GFS2 in addition to pNFS.
NetApp: Pioneer of the NAS market, IT is obviously present in the enterprise segment but is visible in HPC with BeeGFS and supports pNFS.
Pure Storage: FlashBlade is the dedicated NAS product and FlashArray is the unified offering since the integration of Compuverde having finally 2 product exposing industry standard file sharing protocols.
Qumulo: New financial round for the company with a clear acceleration of the business in the enterprise segment and some appearances in the HPC segment. The company is listed in the IO500 list.
Vast Data: Rapid growth with a new architecture that boosts NAS access delivering performance that invites them to shake some HPC positions. The company is listed in the IO500 list.

¹ BlitzScaler refers to the book of Reid Hoffman, founder and former CEO of LinkedIn, titled “Blitzscaling”.

Comparison with the 2019 map shows