Thursday, 30 November 2017

Don’t Confuse Magic Quadrant Positioning with Critical Capabilities Leadership For Object storage

Gartner has always differentiated object storage from distributed file systems, and have published separate Critical Capabilities reports for each. The last Critical Capabilities for object storage was published March 31, 2016. In this report, written by Gartner analysts, Arun Chandrasekaran, Raj Bala and Garth Landers, Gartner recommends that readers of the report “Choose object storage products as alternatives to block and file storage when you need huge scalable capacity, reduced management overhead and lower cost of ownership.” The use cases for object storage and block and file systems are quite different.

 

This report clearly showed Hitachi Vantara’s HCP in a leadership position for object store.

 

Then in October of 2016, Gartner combined object storage and distributed file systems into one Magic Quadrant (MQ) report with the rationale that they are both scale-out storage systems. However, they still recognized the difference in these two technologies in their report.

Quadrant Object store.png

Distributed file system storage uses a single parallel file system to cluster multiple storage nodes together, presenting a single namespace and storage pool to provide high bandwidth for multiple hosts in parallel. Data is distributed over multiple nodes in the cluster to deliver data availability and resilience in a self-healing manner, and to provide high throughput and capacity linearly.”

 

“Object storage refers to devices and software that house data in structures called "objects," and serve clients via RESTful HTTP APIs, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and OpenStack Swift.”

 

In order to place in the Leaders Quadrant a vendor will need to have an object storage system AND a distributed file system. Since only our HCP object storage system was evaluated, HCP was relegated to the Challengers quadrant where we were the only vendor. All the other vendors, aside from the three in the Leaders Quadrant are in the Niche Players or Visionaries Quadrants.

 

On October 17th, Gartner published their second annual "Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage" report, and we are still the only vendor in the Challengers Quadrant. It is important to note that the Magic Quadrant report is NOT a stand-alone assessment of object store.  As the title states, this is a vendor-level analysis based on the COMBINATION of an Object Storage and Distributed File Systems (aka, scale-out NAS) offering.

 

A new Critical Capabilities for object storage is expected to be published in early 2018.  That report will be a more accurate way to evaluate the leadership in object storage systems. We would expect to rank much higher due to the addition of geo-distributed erasure coding and other functionalities in HCP, as well as the addition of Hitachi Content Intelligence to the HCP portfolio.



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