Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays

This market report, revised on December 1, 2020, was authored by analysts Santhosh Rao, Roger W. Cox, Joseph Unsworth, Jeff Vogel, Gartner, Inc.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Primary Storage Arrays

The next gen of primary storage arrays continues to be shaped by NVMe, AIO/s, public cloud integration and alternative consumption models. I&O leaders must view future primary storage array investments as foundational to digital business transformation.

Strategic Planning Assumptions
By 2025, at least 50% of enterprises will shift toward Opex-based storage consumption models, compared to less than 10% today.

By 2023, at least 20% of enterprises will leverage cloud storage management tools to integrate on-premises storage platforms directly with the public cloud for backup and DR use cases.

By 2025, at least 20% of enterprises will adopt NVMe-oF, compared to less than 5% today.

Market Definition/Description
This document was revised on December 1, 2020.

The Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays covers vendors that offer dedicated products or product lines for solid-state arrays (SSAs) or hybrid storage arrays, or both. Hybrid storage arrays include both SSD and HDD configurations. SSA products are 100% solid-state technology-based systems that cannot be combined or expanded with HDDs. SSAs and hybrid storage arrays must both have a dedicated product name and associated model number.

A primary storage array’s foremost purpose is to support response time and IO/s-sensitive structured data workloads. Typical use cases include mission-critical workloads such as DB2, SQL, Exchange and SharePoint, Oracle Databases and applications, SAP HANA, and in-house-developed transactional applications. Other use cases include application consolidation, support for virtual environments and providing persistent storage for container environments.

Primary storage platforms provide a broad library of data services that conserve capacity utilization, protect vs. data loss, and enhance recovery via local and remote replication. The storage media can be SSDs or HDDs, or a combination of the 2. The architecture can be scale-up or scale-out. Host interface protocols can be block-based (FC, SCSI), file-based (NFS and server message block), or a combination of block and file protocols. For SSAs, the host interface may also be NVMe-oF.

Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

DDN (challenger)
In 2019, DDN acquired the Intelliflash product line from Western Digital, further expanding its product portfolio consisting of SFA series and DDN Tintri products. While DDN is already a well-established vendor in the HPC storage market, the Intelliflash and DDN Tintri product lines enable it to address the general-purpose storage requirements of the enterprise. Vendor’s operations are geographically diversified and its clients tend to be in the large enterprise segment. In the last 12 months, the vendor refreshed the Tintri EC6000 hardware platform and made updates to the Tintri and SFA OSs.

Strengths
• The Tintri VMstore and Intelliflash platforms provide a comprehensive set of data services and an intuitive UI, and are easy to use.
• Both support a broad range of hypervisors, backup vendors, public cloud targets and orchestration tools.
• DDN’s SFA series continues to demonstrate market leadership for HPC and A storage use cases.

Cautions
• DDN’s efforts to create an unified AIO/s platform covering all its products remains largely a work in progress.
• Tintri lacks next-gen capabilities such as support for NVMe SSDs and the Container Storage Interface.
• DDN Tintri VMstore and Intelliflash are dual controller systems and do not scale beyond two nodes; therefore, they are less suited for large-scale application consolidation.

Dell Technologies (leader)
Dell EMC PowerMax and PowerStore join EMC Unity XT, SC Series and XtremIO external enterprise storage arrays, positioned for workloads associated with the primary storage. The vendor’s operations are geographically diversified, and its clientele ranges from small to very large enterprises, with a presence in all vertical market segments. The company continues the journey of streamlining multiple enterprise storage products targeting the primary storage market since it acquired EMC in 2016. From a strategy perspective, the vendor is closely aligning its PowerStore offering with VMware to provide hybrid cloud affinity and integrated support for vSphere-based apps.

Strengths
• The firm has a strong direct and indirect sales and support presence via a large network of channel partners in both mature and emerging markets.
• PowerStore with AppsON enables users to natively deploy vSphere-based VMs on the storage array, potentially simplifying and cost optimizing the IT infrastructure.
• The company has provided a broad range of migration tools to assist users in transitioning from installed SC Series, Unity, Unity XT, VNX and XtremIO platforms to the PowerStore offering.

Cautions
• PowerStore has technology gaps involving advanced AIO/s management, dual parity resiliency, end-to-end NVMe and native synchronous replication to bring this new offering up to a best-in-class level.
• PowerStore, PowerMax and Unity have limited native integration with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and rely on dedicated cloud tiering appliances or tools, such as RecoverPoint for VMs and VMware Cloud Foundation, and Dell Cloud Storage for multi-cloud.
• PowerStore’s performance and scale attributes may cause current and potential users of the PowerMax 2000 to reevaluate continued investment in this enterprise storage array platform.

Fujitsu (challenger)
Its product portfolio consists of the Storage ETERNUS AF SSAs and ETERNUS DX hybrid array systems. Fujitsu’s operations are mainly focused in Japan and Western Europe; its clients tend to be in the upper mid-market and large enterprise market segment. In November 2019, the vendor announced new models of the ETERNUS AF and DX series, offering better performance and scalability. In June 2020, it announced an OEM agreement with NetApp. This relationship will enable Fujitsu to sell NetApp FAS, AFF and E-Series via its ETERNUS product line in Japan and its E-Series in Europe. Fujitsu will continue to resell NetApp AFF and FAS in Europe via a reseller’s agreement.

Strengths
• ETERNUS DX and AF product lines provide a comprehensive set of data services that improve manageability and increase overall efficiency.
• The ETERNUS DX8900 S4 can scale to 140PB and 24 controllers, and can therefore address the application consolidation needs of large enterprises.
• The ETERNUS mid-range systems for both the DX and AF product lines are priced lower than most of the vendor’s competitors evaluated in this research.

Cautions
• Existing ETERNUS customers may need to consider NetApp or other alternatives, as Fujitsu will increasingly focus on the OEM relationship with NetApp.
• ETERNUS AF arrays do not support end-to-end NVMe capabilities and only use NVMe SSDs as a cache.
• ETERNUS AF arrays do not provide AIO/s support for their storage systems for enhanced postsales support.

Hitachi Vantara (leader)
Irs operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in the large enterprise segment. The vendor’s storage portfolio consists of the VSP G series, VSP F series, and the newly announced VSP 5000 series and VSP E990. The VSP 5000 series, announced in October 2019, is available in both SSA and hybrid configurations, and replaces the G1500 and F1500 Series. The VSP E990 was announced in April 2020 and is positioned as a mid-range storage array. VSP 5000 series SSAs and the VSP E990 support NVMe SSDs. The VSP 5000 series supports storage-class memory (SCM) as media and the VSP E990 is SCM-ready. Hitachi has made considerable improvements in its VSP platform offerings in the past 12 months in terms of performance and resilience, along with new leadership to address the next phase of company growth.

Strengths
• High-end and mid-range storage systems leverage a common architecture and OS, providing a simplified management and protection experience.
• The company offers a set of unified AI-powered software tools within Hitachi Ops Center to simplify management and improve IT operational efficiencies, thus lowering administration and support costs.
• It offers a 100% data availability, 4:1 effective capacity on newer models and up to 7:1 efficiency guarantees across its entire portfolio.

Cautions
• Clients often cite complexity and difficulty in doing business as the principal reasons when changing vendors or not considering upgrades to existing installations.
• Leadership restructuring and headcount reductions may create market confusion and slow adoption of products and services in a highly competitive market.
• Balancing enterprise direct sales and midmarket channel partners with disparate systems and varying channel initiatives may create confusion and potential conflicts.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (leader)
Its operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in enterprise B2B and B2C markets. Its storage portfolio is characterized by its strong performance and highly available and resilient storage products, as well as its advanced intelligent AIO/s data platform based on InfoSight. Its product portfolio consists of HPE Primera, Nimble Storage, 3PAR and XP series. The Primera product line replaces 3PAR as a high-end storage array targeting tier-1 mission-critical workloads, whereas Nimble Storage is positioned as a mid-range storage array. In the last 12 months, the vendor continued to make incremental investments in its Primera and Nimble Storage product lines and added support for NVMe media and peer persistence on Primera and SCM support on Nimble Storage. In addition, they now support VMware vVOLs and the CSI plug-in for Kubernetes and container automation.

Strengths
• Hybrid IT initiative provides an infrastructure-platform-centric service capability that abstracts hardware asset management complexity and seamless workload mobility across hybrid cloud assets.
• InfoSight’s automation and integration across HPE portfolio assets simplify the customer experience and provide infrastructure wide efficacy and fault-detection capabilities.
• The GreenLake consumption-based offering, combined with HPE’s Timeless Storage program and all-inclusive software licensing, provides flexible asset ownership and nondisruptive future upgrades and refreshes.

Cautions
• Customers should avoid investing in 3PAR and explore alternatives as the product reaches end-of-life status.
• For high-end enterprise applications, HPE lacks a cost-effective storage array offering to address application consolidation use cases due to its shift in R&D investments away from 3PAR and toward Primera, and the positioning of the XP8 to existing XP customers.
• Primera is a relatively new entrant to the high-end storage market in comparison to the established competitor offerings, and does not support analytics for Hyper-V storage environments through HPE InfoSight.

Huawei (leader)
Its product portfolio consists of the OceanStor F V5 series and OceanStor Dorado V6 series SSAs, and the OceanStor V5 hybrid storage systems, which collectively address both mid-range and high-end storage array requirements. The company mainly operates in China, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa. Its clients tend to be in the large enterprise and communications service provider verticals. In the last year, Huawei announced a new series of converged storage systems and released new software updates to the OceanStor Dorado storage arrays.

Strengths
• The firm manufactures its own SSDs and SSD controllers, and therefore is able to optimize flash memory usage and performance, and to sell at competitive price points.
• It supports both NVMe over FC and NVMe over RoCEv2. NVMe over RoCEv2 supports 100GbE-RDMA-based networks and is complemented by NoF, a storage network optimization stack that improves latency and fault tolerance.
• A common storage OS across all product lines of SSA and hybrid array product lines facilitates unified management and enables cost-effective solutions with minimum interoperability issues.

Cautions
• Trade sanctions imposed by the US government may impact roadmap for its next-gen storage systems.
• The firm provides limited array-level integration with leading cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
• It has yet to demonstrate tangible outcomes on automatic and proactive issue resolution delivered through its AIO/s capabilities.

IBM (leader)
It has revitalized its FlashSystem SSA and hybrid array portfolio, along with its high-end DS8900F SSA offerings, thus covering primary storage workloads from the mainframe to general-purpose storage environments. While the vendor relies primarily on its channel partners to address the storage needs of small to midsize organizations, it leverages its trusted advisor position in large global organizations to address large-scale enterprise storage opportunities. To strengthen its position in the primary storage market, IBM is concentrating on providing advanced engineering solutions to accelerate performance, expand security features to protect vs. cyber attacks and ransomware attacks, and strengthen public cloud affinity.

Strengths
• The company offers a broad portfolio of external enterprise storage arrays for the primary storage market that are competitive from a pricing, performance and feature perspective within their respective market segments.
• From entry to high end, the FlashSystem storage array family utilizes a common storage OS, APIs and management for its SSA and hybrid array models.
• A global presence, associated with a competent and mature support infrastructure, sustains IBM’s position as a leading provider of enterprise storage solutions for the primary storage market.

Cautions
• IBM’s attention to the needs of organizations that align with the mid-market category is limited.
• Comprehensive support for general-purpose platforms that support file-based protocols is missing from its primary storage external enterprise storage portfolio, and therefore cannot be positioned to address scenarios that require unified storage.
• Compression and data de-dupe remain missing features on the DS8900F offering.

Infinidat (leader)
Its primary storage portfolio consists of InfiniBox, which is characterized by its high-capacity and performance capabilities and resilient storage architecture. The vendor made 3 major OS updates to its platform during the evaluation period; notable enhancements include the introduction of active-active replication, concurrent three-site replication, a new Kubernetes CSI drive, and security enhancements. Firm’s operations are focused in North America, Europe, South Africa and Japan, and its clients tend to be very large enterprises and service providers.

Strengths
• In a large, multi-peptabyte-scale environment, the Infinidat hybrid storage array provides customers with a storage solution optimized for both price and performance.
• Product adoption among global Fortune 1000 customers and service providers is relatively high due to its 100% availability guarantee, high level of customer satisfaction, ease of management and DRAM/flash-optimized performance.
• Infinidat Elastic Pricing, a hybrid capital expenditure Capex/Opex pricing model, enables customers to instantly activate additional capacity on either a purchase or rental basis.

Cautions
• Multi-petabyte architecture is not ideally suitable for enterprises that require less than 250TB of storage.
• The vendor does not offer an SSA solution, which limits its consideration among customers that view SSA as a requirement.
• It has a limited direct presence in emerging markets; customers in these regions must work with a credible tier-1 Infinidat partner to ensure adequate post-sales support.

Inspur (challenger)
Its product portfolio consists of the HF and AS series that together address a broad range of mid-range and high-end storage array requirements. During the evaluation period, the firm announced the HF5000G5, an end-to-end NVMe-based mid-range storage system. It also enhanced its software and platform capabilities by releasing a CSI driver for Kubernetes environments and making improvements to its AIO/s platform, Inview. Inspur’s sales operations are geographically diversified; however, a majority of its customers are still concentrated in China. Its clients tend to be mainly in the mid-market and large enterprise market segment.

Strengths
• The storage products are aggressively priced to win in price-sensitive markets dominated by established global enterprise storage vendors.
• The Inspur AS series uses dual-port storage-class memory in combination with cache acceleration and an algorithmic-optimized I/O path engine as a zero-storage tier, thus addressing low-latency and high-performance application requirements.
• Inview AIO/s 2.0 can self-adapt and self-optimize for environment changes and workloads by predicting disk, capacity and performance issues in advance.

Cautions
• Predominant concentration of China-based customers creates a sourcing conundrum for risk-averse IT organizations and partners that operate primarily outside China.
• Arrays have limited integration with leading public cloud providers such as Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
• The geopolitical attitude of leaders in North America and Western Europe may preclude organizations located in those countries from considering Inspur as a viable supplier of primary storage arrays.

Lenovo (challenger)
Its ThinkSystem DM Series and DE Series external enterprise storage arrays are positioned to support workloads associated with the primary storage market. Firm’s operations are geographically diversified, with a particular focus on organizations of all sizes within China and small to mid-size organizations in other geographic locations. To enhance its territory coverage and presales support infrastructure, Lenovo is taking steps to realign its sales teams to increase channel focus, and to balance the ratio of technical specialists to account executives. Corporate marketing initiatives are concentrated on sharpening product positioning and messaging statements.

Strengths
• The ThinkSystem enterprise DM Series and entry-level DE Series external enterprise storage platforms are proven and stable offerings.
• The company operates on a global scale, which enables it to focus on supporting fragmented geographic markets left uncovered by other mainstream IT infrastructure providers.
• Leveraging its Intel-architecture-based server portfolio, it is able to provide clients with a single source for external enterprise storage systems and servers.

Cautions
• The responsiveness of Lenovo’s presales and postsales support is influenced by geographical marketing success.
• Lacking the ability to automatically open and close level 1 and level 2 support instances, the ThinkSystem Intelligent Monitoring software does not provide insights beyond the DM and DE Series platforms.
• The ThinkSystem DM Series’ IO/s performance does not scale linearly as the number of nodes increases beyond 2.

NetApp (leader)
Its product portfolio consists of the AFF, FAS, SolidFire, E-Series and EF-Series, which serve a broad range of primary storage workloads. NetApp supports a diverse geographic customer base among midmarket to the largest global organizations through direct sales, channel partners and select OEM partners. The vendor pursues a solution-led focus underpinned by its Data Fabric hybrid cloud strategy. During the evaluation period, it updated its product portfolio with new models and updates to its storage OSs. It also announced Keystone, which allows storage to be purchased through either a subscription or through customized financial plans.

Strengths
• Data Fabric approach, leading product strategy, strong innovation and flexible consumption model – Keystone – offers organizations a flexible platform to manage data, regardless of its placement.
• The vendor continues to lead in full end-to-end NVMe technologies, providing a scalable next-gen infrastructure for advanced performance.
• Active IQ provides cloud-based predictive analytics capabilities, simplifying the post-sales support experience and improving customer satisfaction and storage health.

Cautions
• Customer references show some inconsistencies in speed and capability of resolution for the posts-ales experience and satisfaction.
• Sales and marketing strategies do not fully contemplate the top priorities nor underpin product-value-based benefits of on-premises customer demands, making it difficult for clients to assess product capabilities.
• Some customers in emerging markets express concern regarding a lack of sales growth that could impede the vendor’s ability to service its customers in those geographies.

Oracle (niche)
The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS7-2, available in all-flash and hybrid configurations, is engineered to provide integration with the Oracle Database and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The vendor’s operations are geographically diversified, and its clients’ range is expansive in size and complexity, with penetration in all vertical market segments. The appliances are often deployed alongside Oracle-engineered systems such as Oracle Exadata and Oracle Private Cloud Appliance.

Strengths
• ZFS Storage Appliances support block, file and object protocols using the same storage software.
• They are available under flexible acquisition models, including the traditional capex method, a “right to use” program and a flexible capacity program.
• The Oracle Linux DTrace analytics feature of the ZFS Storage Appliance systems provides real-time analysis and monitoring functionality, enabling fine-grained visibility into disk, flash, controller, CPU, networking, cache, VM and other elements.

Cautions
• Lack of significant new R&D investment in ZFS Storage Appliances is a signal that it is de-emphasizing the importance of the discrete external enterprise storage market in its product portfolio.
• ZFS Storage Appliances do not support NVMe-based SSDs for persistent storage.
• Integration with leading public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud for backup and DR, along with multi-tenancy and synchronous replication, remain missing features in the ZFS Storage Appliance platform.

Pure Storage (leader)
It competes with its NVMe-based products, FlashArray//X and the lower-cost, lower-performance FlashArray//C. It is completely channel-driven and operates mostly in North America, with about one-third of its business international. The vendor caters mainly to the enterprise market and across all verticals, offering its modern data experience predicated on simplicity, flexibility and AIO/s capabilities. In the last 12 months, the company introduced FlashArray//C, targeted for application consolidation and long-term data retention use cases. It also announced Cloud Block Store, which offers a cloud-native storage solution for workloads deployed in AWS.

Strengths
• Pure has standardized on its internally developed NVMe drive technology supported by nondisruptive migrations and customer-friendly business programs.
• Customers report high customer satisfaction due to ease of use and flexible cloud-like consumption programs.
• The FlashArray//C is a QLC 3D NAND-capable array offering more aggressive price points and higher capacities compared to FlashArray//X, and is offered as an alternative to HDD-based and hybrid storage arrays.

Cautions
• Some customers report concerns about the vendor’s lack of sustained profitability.
• It currently lacks NVMe-oF FC network connectivity and stretched metrocluster solutions over FC that may be appealing for advanced customers.
• Customers in emerging markets must ensure that they work with a tier-1 Pure Storage partner to ensure adequate postsales support, and request local customer references, as the company has a limited direct presence in such regions.

Vendors Added and Dropped

• Added: no one
• Dropped: Synology, Infortrend, Western Digital, NEC, Kaminario (now known as Silk)

Market Overview
The external controller-based storage vendor revenue will decline by 22.1% in 2020, followed by a modest growth of 3.7% in 2021 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The adoption of SSAs continues to increase and, in the long term, will continue to buoy the declining ECB market. In 2024, 69.3% of ECB revenue will come from the SSA subsegment, up from 44.4% in 2019. The primary storage market faces other headwinds as customers have accelerated adoption of alternatives such as hyperconverged systems and public cloud. Public cloud computing is expected to grow by 6.3% in 2020, expediting the shift from on-premises enterprise storage footprint to public-cloud-native storage.

In 2020, SSA vendors continued to make incremental investments to their product portfolio and announced products that supported capabilities such as support for SCM) and NVMe-oF technologies. These technologies are available at a premium when compared to traditional SSAs today, and are not yet viewed as compelling and mature enough for enterprises to broadly deploy as storage tiers. Also, unlike the transition from hybrid arrays to SSAs, which enterprises viewed as a significant technology shift with tangible performance benefits, enterprises have yet to understand the value that these new technologies bring to their existing application landscape. Enterprises will therefore look to extend the life of current SSA systems, as they already address the high-performance and availability requirements of most workloads in the enterprise.

Primary storage vendors also continued to make investments in software capabilities that provide tighter integration with public cloud providers, primarily AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure. Storage systems are being designed to handle data mobility to and from public cloud, and to address use cases such as backup to cloud, storage tiering, DR to public cloud and hybrid cloud. Vendors are exploring the possibility of using AI to perform predictive hardware maintenance and automatic storage performance tuning, based on application behavior. Such capabilities are already proven to reduce first- and second-level technical support and a certain degree of agility into the storage system.