Gartner released their 2024 Magic Quadrant report for primary storage platforms last month, which HPE made available for review. It has some significant changes from their 2023 report.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant measures primary data storage platforms on two axes, Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute, and sorts storage platforms into four quadrants, Niche Players, Visionaries, Challengers, and Leaders. Those in the Leaders quadrant have high scores on both axes.
Gartner has changed its definition of what they qualify as a primary storage platform (PSP). They made the changes due to their observations that the primary storage market has evolved to include demand for multi-domain platform-native storage services and the ability to extend on-premises services to public cloud, edge, and colocation environments.
This change means it’s no longer enough for primary data storage platforms to provide on-premises block storage software, but that software needs to be capable of running on-premises, in the cloud, and/or in a hybrid cloud environment.
Gartner’s Primary Storage Platform Requirements
With these storage market changes, Gartner has redefined the requirements for vendor inclusion in the primary storage platform Magic Quadrant reports. The newer requirements are summarized below.
- Block-based storage as a service (STaaS) offering available as a managed service or in conjunction with the end-user client as IT self-managed option.
- Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) providing threshold-based monitoring and insight that supports proactive actions and maintaining infrastructure health.
- Software-defined storage (SDS) architecture that separates vendor storage hardware from the storage operating software that manages the storage platform. The platform must include support for on-premises storage and be integrated with at least one hyperscale cloud platform.
- Cyberstorage data resilience and protection capabilities based on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) for ransomware identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery. (NIST CSF 2.0 also includes data governance).
Gartner notes that other common primary storage platform features include:
- Advanced AIOps real-time event monitoring that supports service level agreement (SLA) threshold conditions and is capable of performing automated responses and actions in response to critical events such as cybersystem resilience, continuous cost optimization, and productivity improvements.
- Support for multiple storage protocols and a disaggregated storage and compute architecture that supports elastic scaling of capacity and compute, independent of each other.
- Carbon dioxide emissions measurement and reporting capabilities that measure total kilograms of CO2 per terabyte (kg CO2/TC).
- Support for non-volatile memory (NVMe) solid state drive (SSD) products for enhanced performance, endurance, management, or other enhanced storage capabilities and data services.
- Ability to perform non-disruptive migration of data from the current storage system to a future storage system with a 100% data availability guarantee.
Impact of This Change
Gartner’s changes have both an immediate and long-term impact on the primary data storage market.
Immediate Impact
Gartner’s requirement changes resulted in nearly all storage vendors receiving lower ratings on the Completeness of Vision axis, moving them to the left. Three storage vendors – Hitachi Vantara, Huawei, and Infinidat – that were considered Leaders in the 2023 Magic Quadrant moved far enough left to be repositioned in the Challengers quadrant.
Long-term Impact
The future of the primary storage market will require vendors to provide platforms that:
- Are software-defined, making the storage operating system separate from the hardware.
- Provide the ability to elastically scale capacity and compute asymmetrically and completely independent of each other.
- Have support for NVMe SSDs for enhanced performance and services.
StorPool
StorPool’s software-defined storage offering was created on an architecture that was built around the three features above. StorPool enables customers to save money by purchasing commodity hardware or repurposing their existing servers. StorPool provides elastic scaling of both capacity and compute completely independent of each other. Lastly, StorPool has extensive support for and use of NVMe SSDs and networking for extremely high performance.
StorPool Storage is a primary data storage platform designed for modern, large-scale cloud infrastructure. The platform delivers the speed, agility, scalability, and price/performance required by modern applications and business needs. StorPool customers are IT service providers building public, private, and hybrid clouds. The StorPool Storage platform is a Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) offering, with a bring your own servers model. It combines storage operating system software, plus a fully-managed storage service that transforms standard hardware into fast, highly-available, and scalable shared storage systems.
Click here to learn more about StorPool’s high performance SDS solution.