Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, 2026

This new Gartner report, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, 2026, belongs to a category of documents that, in the past, many end users and partners considered important when evaluating offerings, preparing an RFP or entering a purchasing process. But after several years of methodology changes and analyst team reshuffling, we increasingly question its real value, or at least the accuracy and consistency of its content. This Enterprise Storage Platforms (ESP) edition reinforces that feeling. But Gartner is a strong name… we expect and we asked several time for some reconsiderations.

Our first observation concerns Gartner’s definition of an enterprise storage platform. In the market definition/description section, Gartner states: “Gartner defines enterprise storage platforms (ESPs) as the market consisting of products and services designed to unify support for diverse block, file and object storage workloads and use cases.”

Our first reaction is that Gartner appears to associate the enterprise-storage qualification primarily with interfaces, essentially, what the storage platform exposes externally.

Reading this paragraph and the mandatory features carefully, we don’t see any meaningful reference to the capacity such an enterprise platform should provide. This immediately raises a question: why are several brands offering these capabilities, sometimes with particularly rich and innovative products, absent from the report? We can mention Vast Data, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Nexsan and StorONE, and potentially others such as Synology, QNAP or Infortrend. Why is IEIT Systems regularly included while other comparable players are not? DDN has also disappeared, without a clear explanation.

There is another inconsistency in the inclusion criteria. Gartner mentions “block and either file or object storage services”, which differs from the market definition above, where block, file **and** object are listed together. The first wording suggests that all three interfaces are required, while the inclusion criteria indicate that block plus only one of the other two is sufficient. If only a subset is mandatory, the number of vendors potentially eligible becomes significantly larger.

The revenue threshold is also somewhat puzzling: $325M. Why $325M rather than $300M? Is this precise threshold designed to include certain vendors while excluding others? More importantly, obtaining revenue at this level of granularity is always difficult, sometimes even for the vendors themselves. How should revenue be counted for a platform capable of supporting all three interfaces but deployed by a customer with only one enabled? Should the entire product revenue qualify, or only revenue associated with deployments actually using the required interfaces? These are very different interpretations.

When the term “enterprise class” is used, it has traditionally implied characteristics such as consolidation capabilities, scalability, connectivity, resilience and significant storage capacity. Yet these dimensions are barely reflected in the methodology. Gartner mentions minimum capacities of 100TB of raw block storage and 500TB of raw file or object storage, thresholds that again raise questions about some of the missing vendors.

Gartner also seems to repeat a common confusion by associating primary storage with block storage. They are not synonymous. Primary storage describes the role storage plays within an organization and the mission it serves, not the protocol used to access it. Many organizations rely on file or even object storage as primary storage for critical workloads. At the same time, NVMe is mentioned while NVMe-oF is not, which is surprising for a report focused on enterprise-class platforms. Our readers may remember when SAN support, switch connectivity, host scalability and similar infrastructure characteristics were important criteria for qualifying a product as enterprise storage.

And when we read the individual vendor assessments, some of the angles and conclusions taken are difficult to reconcile with Gartner’s own market definition and inclusion criteria. We let readers make their own judgment.

Overall, we’re disappointed by this report. In our view, it doesn’t accurately reflect today’s enterprise storage landscape, the diversity of available technologies, or the real requirements and purchasing considerations of enterprise users.

The report is available as a reprint from various players who participated to this study.