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Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object

Storage
Published 18 October 2018 - ID G00338327 - 52 min read
By Analysts Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, John McArthur

IT leaders are looking to deliver agile, scalable and cost-effective storage platforms for ever-
increasing amounts of unstructured data. This research assesses the key attributes, vision and
executional prowess of distributed file systems and object storage vendors.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2022, more than 80% of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise
and cloud data centers, up from 40% in 2018.

By 2022, 30% of enterprises will implement at least one of the hybrid cloud storage approaches, up
from 5% in 2018.

Market Definition/Description
This document was revised on 19 October 2018. The document you are viewing is the corrected
version. For more information, see the  Corrections
(http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/policies/current_corrections.jsp) page on gartner.com.

Storage systems based on distributed file systems and object storage are growing faster than ever in
both number and capacity of deployments, and are becoming the platform of choice to tackle the
growth of unstructured data in enterprise data centers. As Gartner end users have been reporting
unstructured data growth as exceeding 50% year over year, I&O leaders are looking for extensible on-
premises storage products that can address an increasing number of digital business use cases with
lower acquisition, operational and management costs. Enterprises are demanding scalability,
flexibility, automation and programmatic access, such as in-cloud infrastructures with their self-
healing and ease of management. The steep growth of unstructured data for emerging and
established workloads is now requiring products driven by infrastructure software-defined storage
(ISDS) that are capable of leveraging hybrid cloud workflow. New and established storage vendors
are continuing to develop scalable storage clustered file systems and object storage products to
address cost and scalability limitations in traditional, scale-up storage environments.
Gartner defines distributed file systems and object storage as software and hardware solutions that
are based on “shared nothing architecture” and that support object and/or scale-out file technology
to address requirements for unstructured data growth. A shared-nothing architecture is a distributed
computing architecture in which there is no single point of contention across the system. More
specifically, none of the nodes share memory or disk storage. IT professionals typically contrast
shared-nothing architectures with systems that keep a large amount of centrally stored state
information, whether in a database, an application server or any other similar single point of
contention:

■ Distributed file system storage uses a single parallel file system to cluster multiple storage nodes
together, presenting a single namespace and a storage pool to provide high-bandwidth data
access 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 scale
capacity linearly.

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

Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage
Source: Gartner (October 2018)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Caringo
Company information: Caringo is a privately held company, founded in 2005, based in Austin, Texas.
It sells object storage and file archiving software. Caringo’s last round of funding in 2016 was nearly
$9 million, raised from venture capitalists.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: Caringo develops Swarm, an object
storage product. Recent updates to Swarm include performance improvements, S3 protocol updates
and user interface enhancements.

Delivery model: Swarm is most often deployed using server hardware from Cisco, Dell EMC or
Supermicro. Since Swarm is primarily software, it can also be deployed as a virtual machine
instance.

Pricing model: The vast majority of Swarm’s customers purchase the product in a perpetual license
model, although the company also offers an annual subscription option.

Popular use cases: Caringo is often focused on a Mode 1 style of operation that supports
governance and compliance use cases. Nevertheless, the company is attempting to expand its focus
to include a Mode 2 style of operations that supports workloads in media and entertainment and
cloud storage use cases.

Strengths
■ Caringo has delivered a stable object solution for over 12 years, as it was among the first
generation of object storage vendors; however, the company is rare among that generation to
survive as a stand-alone business.

■ Caringo customers frequently make repeat purchases of Swarm, indicating an overall satisfaction
and confidence with the product.

■ Reference customers mention a positive experience, and receive prompt attention in reference to
both Caringo’s sales and support.

Cautions
■ Caringo’s annual revenue trails the leaders in the market for object storage by several orders of
magnitude, reflecting a relatively small business with slow growth.

■ Gartner clients do not often shortlist Caringo’s object storage product for large, petabyte-scale
deployments. Additionally, the average Caringo deployment is small relative to the vendors in this
Magic Quadrant and in the overall market, in terms of both capacity deployed and number of sites.

■ Caringo’s ability to serve large enterprise clients with complex requirements is constrained by the
company’s very small field sales staff compared to its object storage competitors.

Cloudian
Company information: Cloudian is a privately held company founded in 2011 and based in San
Mateo, California. The company raised $94 million in its most recent Series E funding round in
August 2018.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: Cloudian develops HyperStore, an
object storage product that uses Apache Cassandra. Notable recent enhancements to HyperStore 7
include hybrid and multicloud management, WORM, identity access management (IAM) and object
tagging. In December 2017, Cloudian acquired the Infinity Storage file service software company and
the HyperFile NAS product.

Delivery model: HyperStore is sold as both an appliance and as software that can be deployed on
bare-metal servers or in a virtual machine. It is available as a preintegrated Cloudian appliance,
through an OEM relationship with Lenovo and Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), and as a reference
architecture with Cisco and HP Inc. HyperStore can also be purchased and billed through the
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

Pricing model: Cloudian offers HyperStore as an appliance, and as software with both perpetual and
subscription pricing models starting with 10 TB.
Popular use cases: HyperStore is frequently deployed as a target for enterprise backup solutions and
data tiering. It is also used as an archive for rich media and video surveillance.

Strengths
■ In the past 12 months, Cloudian has experienced noticeable growth in the secondary storage
market worldwide, and has expanded its footprint in North American and EMEA enterprises.

■ Reference customers were highly satisfied with the purchasing, deployment, presales engineering
and support process for HyperStore product implementation.

■ Cloudian is expanding its integration by actively partnering with media and entertainment, video
surveillance, and healthcare independent software vendors (ISVs), as well as by qualifying
HyperStore as a target for third-party backup, data management and cloud gateway products.

Cautions
■ Reference end users are confused by Cloudian messaging about expanding toward artificial
intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) and big data workloads, as most of its end users are still
deploying HyperStore for traditional on-premises backup and archiving use cases with third-party
ISVs.

■ Cloudian is considered primarily for object-based workloads as its file service implementation is
still nascent and not fully integrated. Today, it’s delivered as a separate HyperFile NAS controller on
top of HyperStore object storage nodes.

■ Cloudian is beginning to attract more large customers, but is still trailing the leaders in terms or
numbers of large geographically distributed deployments consisting of 10s of petabytes.

DDN
Company information: DDN is a privately held company, founded in 1998 and based in Chatsworth,
California. DDN is not funded by outside investors, but rather has been solely funded by its cash flow
from product sales. DDN is a mature storage supplier to the high-performance computing (HPC)
market, where its Web Object Scaler (WOS) product is positioned as an archive tier for data that no
longer requires high-performance primary storage. DDN is focused on large systems and the high-
end market with a high-touch direct sales model, while fulfillment typically happens through DDN
partners. In June 2017, DDN announced plans to acquire Intel’s Lustre business. Intel Enterprise
Edition for Lustre was based on an open-source parallel distributed file system focusing on HPC
workloads.

DDN did not respond to requests for supplemental information, or for a review of the draft contents
of this research. Therefore, Gartner analysis is based on other credible and accepted public sources.
Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: DDN develops WOS, an object storage
product with a focus on performance. WOS has had no notable product enhancements in the past 12
months.

Delivery model: WOS is offered in two appliance options varying in capacity and performance, and is
available as a software-only distribution on preapproved third-party systems.

Pricing model: WOS is only offered in a traditional, perpetual license pricing model.

Popular use cases: WOS is often used as an archive tier for DDN’s HPC-focused products.

Strengths
■ DDN has a heritage in the HPC market and has the resources in place to effectively serve the
object storage needs of these customers with WOS.

■ Enterprises can select from a variety of WOS hardware and software deployment options that suit
their respective infrastructure, cost and management preferences.

■ DDN offers seamless integration between WOS and its parallel file system appliances, GRIDScaler
and EXAScaler, for handling warm and cold datasets between these environments transparently.

Cautions
■ DDN has had no notable product updates to WOS in the past 12 months, raising substantial
questions about the strategic nature of WOS to DDN.

■ WOS prioritizes performance over security features, and lacks server-side encryption and HTTP
authentication. Further, WOS’s S3 API compatibility, which uses Apache HBase, is implemented on
an architecture that does not scale well beyond a single site.

■ DDN’s vision for object storage trails other vendors that are innovating in the direction of public
and hybrid cloud capabilities.

Dell EMC
Company information: Dell EMC, founded in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, in 1979, is part of privately
held Dell Technologies. Dell EMC primarily sells on-premises storage hardware, software, servers and
networking equipment.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: This Magic Quadrant considers two
products: Isilon, a distributed file system with over 9,000 customers, and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS)
object storage with over 1,100 customers. Notable Isilon enhancements were introduced more than
12 months ago with new Gen 6 solutions (all-flash, hybrid and all-HDD), targeting different workloads
and use cases. In September 2017, Isilon OneFS added support for self-encrypting drives (SED) for
the Gen 6 platforms. Notable ECS enhancements include metadata search, life cycle policies and
compliance enhancements. In December 2017, the vendor introduced the Future-Proof Loyalty
Program for both Isilon and ECS products to provide satisfaction, efficiency and migration
guarantees for new customers.

Delivery model: Both Isilon and ECS are most frequently sold with Dell EMC hardware, but both can
be deployed as software only. Isilon is now also available as part of the Dell EMC VxBlock integrated
infrastructure system product. The products can also be acquired as private, dedicated infrastructure
in Virtustream’s cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Pricing model: ECS and Isilon software are most frequently sold in a traditional, perpetual model. The
Isilon OneFS license includes both per-node and per-TB capacity options, and the price varies by the
type of nodes. ECS offers flexible pricing options, including an amortized-pricing model and a pay-as-
you-go model.

Popular use cases: ECS is primarily used as an archive and cloud storage for unstructured data when
object storage is preferred. Isilon is primarily used to support high-throughput, file-based workloads,
and is increasingly used for ultralarge analytics workloads.

Strengths

■ New customer loyalty programs with aggressive discounts, combined with last year’s hardware
refresh and all-flash models addressing new workloads, all contributed to Isilon remaining on the
top of end-users’ shortlists.

■ Customers have described ECS as feature-rich offering multiprotocol support (S3, HDFS and NFS),
a global namespace, built-in replication that enables disaster recovery, modular scalability and
support for very large deployments.

■ The large installed base of Isilon and growing installed base of ECS, combined with integrated
implementation planning and postimplementation support experience from Dell EMC, give
customers confidence in the reliability of the offerings.

Cautions
■ Isilon and ECS products are trailing their competition in hybrid cloud integration workflow with
public cloud IaaS. Transparent data tiering with CloudPools does not provide direct access by
cloud-resident applications in its native form.

■ Competitors in the distributed file system and object storage market are improving and innovating
faster than Dell EMC, and gaining meaningful market share.

■ Customer references report that successful implementations and upgrades of both Dell EMC
Isilon and ECS require careful planning and support of professional services.
Hitachi Vantara
Company information: Hitachi Vantara, a Santa Clara, California-based subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd.,
first entered the object storage market with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) in 2006 and now has
more than 2,100 customers globally. HCP has evolved and expanded its object storage portfolio with
integrated products including enterprise file sync and share (EFSS), a cloud storage gateway and
search analytics. Hitachi Vantara leverages HCP’s unique custom metadata storage and query
capabilities to empower integrations with other Hitachi Vantara technologies, such as Pentaho,
providing core data management components to big data analytics projects and support for Hitachi’s
“Social Innovation” projects.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: Hitachi Vantara offers four products
under the umbrella of object storage. They are Hitachi Content Platform, an object storage solution;
HCP Anywhere, for file synchronization and sharing and end-user data protection; Hitachi Data
Ingestor (HDI), a cloud file gateway; and Hitachi Content Intelligence, providing search and analytics
insights. Over the past 12 months, Hitachi Vantara announced support for 10 TB Seagate SAS drives,
an S3 API enhancement with multipart object upload, and event-based retention for compliance with
DoD 5015.02-STD electronic records management application design requirements and SEC 17a
regulations. Also announced were conditional tiering, separation of management and data networks
through a designated management port, support for 1.25 billion objects per node, IPv6 certification,
support for Windows 10 clients, and security updates that prevent clickjacking and breach security
threats.

Delivery model: HCP can be deployed as an engineered appliance, as software running as a virtual
machine or as a managed service with back-end capacity provided by its own S series nodes or any
external storage area network (SAN) array.

Pricing model: Pricing options include a capacity-based perpetual license, a capacity-based

enterprise license agreement (ELA), a financial lease and a monthly managed service solution with
fees based on capacity consumption.

Popular use cases: HCP is best-suited for traditional archiving solutions as well as new diverse use
cases such as EFSS, public cloud onramp and data management for distributed workloads.

Strengths
■ HCP is a mature product that is deployed across a wide range of industries and geographies, with
strong expertise in compliance-focused archiving. HCP customers describe the product as simple
to implement, highly stable and easy to manage.

■ Hitachi Vantara’s efforts to enhance the quality of service and support for HCP are showing
positive results in customer reviews.
■ HCP continues to maintain and expand one of the broadest ISV support ecosystems in the
industry.

Cautions
■ Gartner clients are concerned that the recent reorganization and shift of the Hitachi Vantara
business focus to Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics use cases may result in a reduction in the
vendor’s focus as a general-purpose object storage platform.

■ Hitachi Vantara lacks a distributed file system product in its portfolio, which can be a limiting
factor for end users looking for a performant and scalable file protocol and support for mixed
workloads.

■ While HCP marketing messages promise a data platform for digital transformation and large-scale
deployments, the reality is that, in comparison to the leading vendors, many Gartner end users limit
consideration of HCP to traditional use cases and smaller-size deployments.

Huawei
Company information: Huawei is a global provider of ICT solutions founded in 1987 and
headquartered in Shenzhen, China. The company provides products and services for carrier,
enterprise and consumer customers with a broad portfolio of storage solutions. Huawei has steadily
grown its storage revenue and is currently the largest storage provider in China, which is where the
bulk of its storage deployments are based.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: Huawei offers multiple products in
this category. The OceanStor 9000 is deployed as a scale-out network-attached storage (NAS)
product, while FusionStorage 7.0, which is positioned as a block and object storage product, is being
used by Huawei public cloud IaaS as an underlying storage offering. Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 series
had minor enhancements in the past 12 months, including new hardware platform support.
FusionStorage 7.0 now supports ARM servers and introduced asynchronous replication. It has also
increased performance per bucket and added asynchronous replication across regions.

Delivery model: OceanStor 9000 is delivered as a hardware appliance, while FusionStorage 7.0 is
delivered as an appliance or as software on certified Huawei servers.

Pricing model: The OceanStor 9000 is priced on a per-node basis, while the FusionStorage 7.0
software is priced on a capacity basis.

Popular use cases: For OceanStor 9000, use cases include video surveillance, big data analytics,
home directories and commercial HPC. For FusionStorage 7.0, use cases include cloud storage,
hybrid cloud storage, backup and archiving. FusionStorage 7.0 is also used as the SDS component of
Huawei’s FusionCube hyperconverged solution.
Strengths
■ Reference end users are showing a high degree of satisfaction with both storage products from
Huawei in the areas of scalability and resilience, as well as deployment experience.

■ OceanStor 9000 continues to exhibit strong momentum in the “safe city” market, and is now
bundled with Huawei’s Intelligent Video Surveillance solution to handle the whole process of video
surveillance, including storage and analytics covering edge, core and cloud deployment.

■ FusionStorage 7.0 is ready to enable hybrid cloud connectivity between on-premises and public
cloud environments, although its public cloud IaaS presence is mostly focused on China today.

Cautions

■ Huawei’s traction outside of the Asia/Pacific region and EMEA continues to be virtually
nonexistent, as it struggles to grow its customer and channel partner base due to geopolitical and
brand recognition issues.

■ The OceanStor 9000 is still not offered as software-defined storage or all-flash options, and is not
integrated with public cloud IaaS. Moreover, FusionStorage 7.0 is still an early-stage product that
lacks key features such as compression and distributed erasure coding.

■ FusionStorage 7.0 supports object and file protocols, but requires end users to buy a separate
gateway in order to access objects from file interfaces.

IBM
Company information: IBM is a large IT vendor founded in 1911 and headquartered in Armonk, New
York, providing hardware, software and services for enterprises and midsize businesses.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: IBM has two products included in this
research: IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS). IBM Spectrum Scale is a scale-
out file system formerly known as General Parallel File System (GPFS). Recent enhancements in the
5.0 release include improved scalability and performance, more autotuned parameters, audit logging
for GDPR support, REST APIs for management automation, and call-home support. IBM COS is a
highly scalable and resilient object storage product, added to IBM’s product portfolio through its
acquisition of Cleversafe. Recent product enhancements include WORM, a “concentrated dispersal
mode” enabling a lower 72 TB minimum configuration, and compliance-enabled vaults to protect
data from deletion or modification as required by SEC Rule 17a-4 and FINRA Rule 4511.

Delivery model: IBM Spectrum Scale can be deployed as software only, AWS Quick Start and a
hardware appliance sold by IBM as Elastic Storage Server (ESS), or as a reference architecture by
certified third-party OEMs. IBM COS is delivered as software only or in the form of hardware
appliances, and is supported on a number of compatible hardware platforms from suppliers such as
Cisco, Supermicro, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Seagate, Dell and Lenovo.

Pricing model: IBM Spectrum Scale has a new and simplified effective-capacity-based licensing
model as an additional alternative to node-based pricing. ESS (a Spectrum Scale appliance) pricing is
strictly capacity-based. IBM COS is licensed on a raw capacity basis.

Popular use cases: Use cases for IBM Spectrum Scale include scientific and commercial HPC, big
data analytics, AI, home directories, backup, and active archiving. For IBM COS, use cases include
archiving, backup and content distribution.

Strengths

■ IBM COS and Spectrum Scale customers cite reliability, performance and superior scalability as
key reasons for choosing the products.

■ IBM Spectrum Scale is being sold by many OEM partners and is considered a top choice for
distributed file storage in HPC use cases.

■ IBM Spectrum Scale offers multicluster and cross-geography, single-name space support, with the
ability to expand to public clouds.

Cautions

■ IBM Spectrum Scale customers note that the product has many features impacting performance
and efficiency that are poorly documented, resulting in less-than-optimal initial deployments.

■ When designing and implementing IBM Spectrum Scale installations through partners, the IBM
partner selection process is critical, as the knowledge of partners varies widely. End users must
carefully select partners with deep knowledge and proven experience in large-scale deployments.

■ Although IBM COS has a positive reputation, the product is also priced at the top end for object
storage products. Other products in this Magic Quadrant are catching up to the scalability and
reputation of COS, and may be purchased at a lower cost.

Inspur
Company information: Inspur is a China-based server vendor, diversifying into the storage market in
2001, launching with the Active Storage (AS) brand in 2006 and introducing the infrastructure SDS
(AS13000) platform in 2014. Inspur is focused on growing its storage business, which is currently the
second largest after its server business. Almost all of Inspur’s storage sales have come from China,
with the government and transportation/logistics industry accounting for more than half of its
revenue.
Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: Inspur has been focusing on
addressing new growing workloads such as HPC, AI/ML and big data analytics, and has leveraged its
leadership to grow its storage business. Inspur AS13000 is unified distributed storage sold as a
distributed file system and object storage product designed to support from 3 to 5,120 nodes, up to
1,792 PB capacity. Over the last 12 months, Inspur AS13000 has added snapshots, tiering, WORM,
small-file coalescing, caching improvement and multitenancy support.

Delivery model: Inspur delivers the AS13000 as a hardware appliance; however, a software-only
solution is also available for strategic customers and partners. The AS13000 is also sold as a part of
the Inspur InCloud Rack converged system.

Pricing model: Inspur AS13000 can be purchased as a traditional capital expenditure (capex) with a
perpetual license. Advanced features like snapshots, tiering, replication and others are not included
in the base price and require additional licenses.

Popular use cases: Inspur AS13000 is most frequently deployed for HPC, big data analytics, AI ML,
backup and archiving.

Strengths
■ The AS13000 is particularly suitable for enterprises in the Asia/Pacific region, as Inspur is
aggressively growing its market share. Today, it has been rapidly deployed in hundreds of Chinese
government and financial institutions, telecom carriers, and media companies.

■ In China, Inspur has taken a leadership position as it relates to AI/ML, HPC and big data analytics
workloads on its server platforms, which has created a demand for a turnkey solution that
includes its AS13000 distributed file system product.

■ Reference customers are outlining that AS13000’s all-in-one multiprotocol support, high
performance and extreme scalability are three differentiating factors against its competition in the
Chinese market for HPC.

Cautions
■ Most buyers are unaware of Inspur’s storage capabilities and market presence. As Inspur is still
evolving from a server to a portfolio company, it does not have a history and brand recognition in
enterprise storage.

■ End users report that Inspur’s services, engineering support and reseller network for storage
products are weak outside of China, where it still struggles to grow its market share.

■ Inspur AS13000 is still a relatively nascent unified product and is mostly deployed for file
workloads. It is missing some key data reduction and security features, and newer protocol
support.
NetApp
Company information: NetApp is a publicly held company, founded in 1992 and based in Sunnyvale,
California. The company primarily sells on-premises storage infrastructure, but is expanding to
include hybrid cloud data services.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: In this research, NetApp is
represented by StorageGRID, an object storage product whose primary access method is the Amazon
S3 API. Notable enhancements over the past 12 months include Elasticsearch integration, adherence
to SEC and FINRA regulations, and hybrid cloud workflow improvements.

Delivery model: StorageGRID is software that is primarily deployed as part of NetApp-packaged

hardware, but can also be deployed in a series of Docker containers or virtual machine instances, or
a combination of the supported deployment methods.

Pricing model: StorageGRID can be acquired as a traditional, perpetual license or in a subscription

model based on capacity consumed per month.

Popular use cases: StorageGRID’s roots are in the healthcare space, serving as storage infrastructure
for unstructured data such as medical images. However, newer iterations of StorageGRID have
broadened its appeal to modern application use cases, such as applications that utilize the product’s
S3 API.

Strengths
■ StorageGRID is making noticeable progress in the market for object storage and is a formidable
challenger when faced with the products from more established object storage competitors.
NetApp often uses an attractive price as a favorable differentiator in competitive situations.

■ StorageGRID is beginning to attract large, well-known brand names to its platform spanning a
diverse set of industries, including manufacturing, media and entertainment, healthcare, and
transportation.

■ NetApp was early to embrace the public cloud compared to many of its larger, more established
competitors. This has resulted in deep integrations with public cloud providers such as AWS to
create compelling hybrid cloud storage solutions.

Cautions
■ NetApp does not have a distributed file system offering with the shared-nothing attributes
emblematic of products in this space. Instead, StorageGRID relies on a scale-up gateway
implementation for file protocols that does not have the resilience qualities that enterprises often
seek.
■ StorageGRID has a short track record as a hybrid cloud solution. Despite having innovative hybrid
cloud storage capabilities, the number of customers using those capabilities is low relative to
other vendors in this market.

■ StorageGRID is not well-known to Gartner end users as it’s often overshadowed within NetApp’s
portfolio given that it’s a small business, compared to other NetApp products with significantly
larger revenue. Despite the products’ successes, this results in less airtime and attention because
the products effectively compete against each other.

Pure Storage
Company information: Pure Storage, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Mountain View,
California, is a growing public company focused on delivering solid-state storage arrays for the
enterprise market. With the introduction of its distributed file system product, FlashBlade, in January
2017, Pure Storage has been aggressively tackling the unstructured data market, looking for the high-
performance and low-latency solutions leveraging the latest solid-state technology.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: The Pure Storage FlashBlade
distributed file system and object storage product is based on a scale-out blade design. Each blade
contains a storage controller and solid-state storage media, and is available in different capacities to
meet a range of system sizes. The blades have been designed and engineered by Pure Storage to
provide low-latency, high-throughput performance leveraging parallel access to all-flash blade media
in a dense, high-capacity storage footprint. Over the past 12 months, Pure Storage added snapshots,
expanded protocol support, improved file system scalability and hardware density, and added
management API support.

Delivery model: FlashBlade is delivered as a preintegrated hardware appliance or as part of the

converged FlashStack system with Cisco or the AIRI system with NVIDIA.

Pricing model: All-inclusive pricing is based on usable capacity, assuming no data reduction. Both
capex traditional and operating expenditure (opex) consumption models are available.

Popular use cases: FlashBlade is being targeted for AI/ML, real-time analytics, life sciences, HPC and
rapid restore data protection workloads.

Strengths

■ Pure Storage is now a trusted brand in the enterprise, as illustrated by how, in the short period
since its general availability in January 2017, FlashBlade has been rapidly growing in customer
adoption, which now exceeds 200 customers.

■ FlashBlade is targeting emerging AI/ML and real-time data analytics workloads that require a
unified system that is designed for all-flash and capable of delivering high performance for mixed
and metadata-intensive workloads.
■ Pure Storage products are delivering high customer satisfaction through simplicity of engineering,
pricing and licensing, deployment, management, and customer support.

Cautions
■ FlashBlade is not a general-purpose file system replacement. It is considerably more expensive
than alternative products in this segment due to its focus on the high end of the market, where end
users are willing to pay a premium for high-bandwidth and low-latency file system and object
storage.

■ FlashBlade is not designed for a broad range of Windows-oriented workloads due to a poor SMB
implementation that will challenge scalability and performance characteristics for some Windows
workloads requiring low latency. This is reinforced by reference customers that desire significantly
improved SMB capabilities.

■ FlashBlade is an all-flash solution and does not natively support tiering to an external system,
which will force customers to seek another tiering capability and target a low-cost storage solution
for their data life cycle management needs. Further, the product has no hybrid cloud integration,
which will limit its applicability at the edge and in public cloud IaaS deployments.

Qumulo
Company information: Qumulo, headquartered in Seattle, was founded in 2012 and raised a total of
$222.3 million in six rounds of funding. In January 2018, Qumulo opened offices in EMEA. Qumulo
File Fabric (QF2) is a scale-out NAS product that runs on-premises and in the public cloud, and it was
first released in March 2015. HPE now offers preintegrated Qumulo Core appliances and, in addition,
Qumulo software is available on AWS Marketplace, third-party hardware and standard hardware that
Qumulo sells to customers.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: QF2 is a scale-out file system product
that was designed for large-scale, high-throughput file workloads that require granular performance
analytics and capacity management. The Qumulo Core cluster can scale up from four nodes and 96
TB capacity (or 5 TB on AWS) to 1,000 nodes or 360 PB capacity. Over the past 12 months, Qumulo
has added the following features: continuous replication, per-directory snapshots, protection from
three concurrent drive failures, QF2 in AWS, QF2 on all-flash, as well as major read, write and IOPS
performance improvements. Qumulo uses an agile development methodology and has delivered new
features and releases on a biweekly basis, which amounted to 25 new releases since June 2017. The
product has successfully gained traction and rapidly grew in data-intensive industries such as media
and entertainment, imaging, artificial intelligence and machine learning, life and earth sciences,
telecommunications, automotive, manufacturing, oil and gas, and higher education.

Delivery model: Qumulo Core software is delivered as an appliance or a software-only product on

precertified commodity hardware: Qumulo K-Series, QC-Series, and P-Series, Dell EMC PowerEdge
Servers, HPE Apollo 4200 Gen9 Servers as well as software-defined storage on AWS.

Pricing model: Qumulo is priced as a software subscription based on raw capacity of the hardware
for terms from one to five years; it includes all new releases, features and software support, and is
transferable across hardware.

Popular use cases: Qumulo Core is best-suited for hybrid cloud storage, commercial HPC, analytics,
content distribution and active archiving.

Strengths
■ Qumulo is making noticeable gains in the market for distributed file systems, particularly when
juxtaposed against its traction from the previous year. Relatedly, end users are overwhelmingly
positive in terms of the vendor’s responsiveness and the expertise of the Qumulo engineering and
support staff.

■ QF2 hybrid cloud capability goes beyond backup to the public cloud and offers a scale-out file
system that operates seamlessly and identically across on-premises and public cloud
environments to enable public cloud bursting capability for processing data in the cloud.

■ Qumulo’s aggressive execution on hardware, software, analytics and cloud capabilities, together
with rapid biweekly software release deployment, gives end users quick turnaround on features or
problem solving.

Cautions
■ Qumulo traction remains mostly in North America. While HPE resells Qumulo globally, the end
users in other geographical areas rarely consider Qumulo for large-scale strategic product
investments.

■ Qumulo reference customers outline a lack of deep archiving features and would like to see QF2
expand support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud platforms.

■ Today, Qumulo does not fully address all requirements of the unstructured storage market. It lacks
native support for object storage S3 API, file protocols such as SMB3 and NFSv4, compression
and deduplication, and support for seamless operations such as cluster node removal.

Red Hat
Company information: Red Hat is a publicly traded company founded in 1993 and headquartered in
Raleigh, North Carolina, with a strong pedigree of open-source products across OSs, middleware,
cloud management, containers, platform as a service (PaaS) and storage.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: Red Hat Ceph Storage is an open-
source software product supporting block, object storage access and file access, and the underlying
storage for Red Hat’s data analytics infrastructure solution and Red Hat Hyperconverged
Infrastructure for Cloud. Recent enhancements include the release of the CephFS file system as a
production-ready product; enhanced container storage support, through improved OpenShift
integration and iSCSI support. Red Hat Gluster Storage is an open-source product primarily sold as a
scale-out NAS product, and the underlying storage for OpenShift Container Storage as well as Red
Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization. Recent enhancements include the availability of
Ceph and Red Hat Storage One appliances through OEM partnerships and hyperconverged
infrastructure products leveraging Gluster.

Delivery model: Red Hat Ceph Storage is sold as software direct to customers and through reference
architectures. Red Hat Gluster Storage is sold as a software subscription direct to customers,
through reference architectures or as Red Hat Storage One appliances through OEM partners.

Pricing model: Red Hat Ceph Storage has a subscription software pricing model based on raw
capacity. Red Hat Gluster Storage has a subscription software pricing model based on the number of
nodes.

Popular use cases: Both products serve a variety of Mode 1 and Mode 2 use cases. Use cases for
Red Hat Ceph Storage include OpenStack private cloud storage, big data, backup and archiving. For
Red Hat Gluster Storage, use cases include hyperconverged infrastructure, archiving, backup,
container/PaaS storage, home directories and media streaming.

Strengths

■ Red Hat Ceph Storage is a versatile product that is increasingly being deployed as a block, file and
object storage system. Customers value the hardware independence, and organizations with in-
house skills value the open-source model for rapid problem resolution.

■ Red Hat Gluster Storage is tightly integrated with both the OpenShift platform for containers and
Kubernetes, enabling data persistence and protection for containerized workloads in either
hyperconverged or disaggregated form factors. End users value Red Hat’s commercial support for
open-source products and often chose this vendor due to its ability to provide full-stack
infrastructure solutions.

■ Both Red Hat Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage are certified across a broad spectrum of server
hardware, with reference architectures available from leading server OEMs like HPE, Cisco and
Supermicro, and as hardware appliances through backup vendors like Commvault.

Cautions

■ Red Hat continues to maintain separate pricing models for Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage, with
Ceph licensed on a raw capacity basis and Gluster licensed on a node basis. This complicates
subscription management, and makes Red Hat Ceph Storage expensive relative to other open-
source alternatives.
■ Some Red Hat Ceph Storage customers cite the need for better monitoring and automated
deployment, as well as snapshot and replication capabilities for CephFS.

■ As Red Hat continues international expansion, the company will require a better onboarding
experience as well as improved documentation in local languages to shorten the learning curve for
its software-defined storage platforms.

Scality
Company information: Scality is a venture-backed, privately held company founded in 2009, with
corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California. It has been delivering its RING object and scale-
out file storage software-only product since 2010. Scality RING’s version 7.4.1 was released in
August 2018.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: Scality RING is scale-out, peer-to-peer
distributed shared-nothing software that can be deployed on any x86 commodity hardware. It offers
native file and object capabilities, as well as support for OpenStack protocols. Scality RING features
an integrated virtual file system that provides file storage services without the need for external file
gateways, unlike the majority of other object storage solutions. In its 7.4.1 release, Scality RING
delivered utilization reporting to support capacity planning, billing and chargeback, and reporting
enhancements to the Amazon S3 Service Management console. Over the past 12 months, Scality has
delivered an S3 API for the Azure Blob API translator in Zenko, an S3 multicloud data controller with
global metadata search capability. Scality has also delivered a simplified installer supporting over 45
reference architectures and a simplified supervisor management portal. Scality RING now can be
deployed on as few as three servers, reducing the capacity entry point to more closely match the
requirements of large edge deployments.

Delivery model: Scality RING is offered as software only, running on any x86 standard Linux
distribution. Scality provides reference architectures with hardware OEM partners, and has strategic
alliances and reseller partnerships with Cisco and Dell, and an OEM agreement with HPE.

Pricing model: The product is priced as a perpetual or hardware-lifetime-usable-capacity-based

license, with optional add-ons for geodistribution, an email connector and a compliance connector.

Popular use cases: Scality RING is best-suited for multipetabyte, geographically-distributed

deployments of unstructured data for content distribution, email, video, backup, active archiving,
medical imaging, and HPC archiving.

Strengths
■ Scality is a well-funded software company with an established and growing customer base of
deployments in North America and EMEA. Many of the deployments are more than 10 PB.
■ Scality customers praise the true hardware independence of Scality RING, and the ability to run
and expand mixed-server environments without interruptions of service.

■ Scality Connect for Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and its Zenko multicloud controller are built to
take advantage of public cloud IaaS and enable cloud tiering and disaster recovery workflows.

Cautions
■ Performance of Scality RING is dependent on the server hardware platform chosen. Customers
should run a proof of concept on approved reference architectures prior to full deployment, and
include an evaluation of the depth of component-level hardware performance and failure
monitoring and management.

■ As a software-only vendor competing for very large deployments, Scality lacks the ability to fully
respond to pricing pressure from vendors offering an integrated, cost-optimized hardware
appliance.

■ Scality has spent a considerable amount of time and effort focused on delivering multicloud
management capabilities with Zenko, just announced in September 2018; however, customer
interest in multicloud deployment is lacking.

SwiftStack
Company information: SwiftStack, based in San Francisco and founded in 2011, is a software-
defined storage vendor and the main contributor to the OpenStack Swift project as well as 1space
and ProxyFS, which are focused on hybrid/multicloud and file access respectively. SwiftStack’s
original focus was to improve the deployment and management of OpenStack Swift, but the
company is largely focused on Amazon S3 API support and has expanded to adjacent areas such as
hybrid cloud storage.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: SwiftStack provides native object
storage in addition to a well-integrated file system gateway layered on top of the object storage core.
SwiftStack version 6 was launched in December 2017, and SwiftStack now supports Google Cloud
Platform in addition to AWS. Also included in this release were multiregional erasure coding and
more scalable containers/buckets.

Delivery model: SwiftStack delivers a software-only solution that is also available as a bundled
solution from Cisco and its resellers. In addition, SwiftStack has joint reference architectures with
HPE, Dell and Supermicro.

Pricing model: SwiftStack is licensed on a subscription basis based on usable capacity under
management. It also offers an optional perpetual licensing option.
Popular use cases: Use cases include media, scientific research data, backup and archive, and
storage for cloud-native applications.

Strengths
■ SwiftStack leverages open-source innovation while focusing its engineering on enterprise data
services and integration. Particularly noteworthy are the company’s hybrid cloud storage
endeavors and continued open-source contributions such as ProxyFS, its file system and object
storage interoperability layer.

■ SwiftStack offers flexible consumption options for organizations — it is software-based with a

subscription licensing model based on usable, rather than raw, capacity. It also offers a perpetual
licensing model based on capacity for organizations that prefer a capex-based model.

■ SwiftStack is mostly focused on modern workloads such as those involving media rendering,
genomics and commercial HPC use cases. This is in contrast to some vendors that are tied to
governance and compliance use cases due to their products’ lineage.

Cautions
■ SwiftStack is mostly deployed in North America and has a smaller go-to-market effort compared
to the larger, mainstream vendors and its startup-scale competitors.

■ SwiftStack does not sell its products in a turnkey appliance form factor. Instead, the company
relies on reference architectures with server vendors such as Cisco, HP and Supermicro, which
sometimes slows adoption of the product.

■ SwiftStack is promoting a multicloud data management solution to abstract multiple public cloud
providers, but end-user adoption is low because such functionality is not considered a must-have
feature for object storage.

SUSE
Company information: SUSE, founded in 1992 and operating as a semiautonomous business unit
within the Micro Focus Group since 2014, is a diversified open-source software company that is well-
known as the second-largest Linux vendor. Closing in 1Q19, SUSE is to be acquired by European
investment firm EQT for $2.5 billion.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: The SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES)
product is based on Ceph and provides unified access for block, file and object protocols, with a
focus on features required by mainstream enterprises. SUSE is one of the eight founding
organizations on the Ceph Advisory Board and the No. 2 contributor to the Ceph open-source
community. Recent SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 enhancements include the enhancement of
openATTIC and DeepSea management and configuration tools, production support for CephFS, as
well as commercially supported deployment of Ceph BlueStore for storage performance
improvement.

Delivery model: SES is delivered as software or as a reference architecture through hardware OEMs
with Dell EMC, Supermicro, HPE, Lenovo, Huawei, Fujitsu and Cisco.

Pricing model: SES has a node-based subscription pricing model.

Popular use cases: SES use cases include private cloud storage, content distribution, backup and
archiving.

Strengths

■ SUSE is an active contributor to the Ceph open-source community, with a focus on making Ceph
“enterprise consumable” by introducing improvements in manageability and supportability.
Reference end users call it the most feature-rich Ceph product, with great automation and
dashboard capabilities.

■ SUSE has a simple node-based pricing model for Ceph with unlimited capacity, which provides one
of the lowest-cost offerings for large-capacity implementations.

■ In FY18, SUSE has doubled its number of customers and now is often being considered as a
commercial support solution for Ceph storage.

Cautions
■ SUSE’s ability to increase traction in the storage market is limited by its relatively small global
sales force, lack of end-user awareness of SUSE storage products, and limited Ceph expertise on
the OEM reseller and integrator front.

■ SUSE is undergoing a lengthy change of ownership that is limiting near-term investments and
raising long-term uncertainty for the SUSE storage business.

■ Many reference customers cite a steep learning curve for Ceph-based products, which was further
exacerbated by the poor quality of SUSE Enterprise Storage documentation.

Western Digital (HGST)

Company information: HGST is part of the Western Digital family of brands. ActiveScale is based on
Amplidata object storage technology, which was acquired in 2015. That same year, it launched its
product as HGST Active Archive System, a high-density appliance that is designed for multipetabyte
object storage deployments and high-throughput operations.

Product description and enhancements over past 12 months: ActiveScale introduced two-site
asynchronous replication, and enhanced hybrid cloud storage support and the ability to deploy
selected Docker containers on the platform itself.

Delivery model: ActiveScale is delivered as an integrated appliance system.

Pricing model: Base configurations of ActiveScale are priced inclusive of hardware and software, and
are priced by capacity, with cloud-based storage analytics included as well. In addition, Western
Digital offers flexible capacity, capacity on demand and leasing options.

Popular use cases: ActiveScale is best-suited for large-scale deployments of analytics, archive,
content distribution and backup when a turnkey appliance is the preferred delivery model.

Strengths
■ Western Digital is leveraging the company’s combined resources, such as disk storage
manufacturing and supply chain expertise, to deliver distinct and compelling value for
ActiveScale’s overall hardware efficiency. In particular, the company is able to optimize drive size
and placement within a rack at the point of manufacturing.

■ ActiveScale is deployed or being considered as a solution for very large unstructured data
management challenges, despite being a relatively new product. Customers frequently appreciate
the cost-competitive nature of ActiveScale relative to the market.

■ The ActiveScale team has one of the most comprehensive approaches to supporting analytics
applications, which includes contributions to the Hadoop source code. This is in anticipation of
capitalizing on a potential future opportunity despite the nascent use of analytics workloads with
on-premises object storage platforms today.

Cautions
■ ActiveScale trails the competition with regard to offering native, distributed file capabilities.
ActiveScale’s implementation of distributed files is very new and currently in beta. Such
capabilities typically require many years and significant investment to mature in terms of
performance and scale.

■ The market perceives Western Digital as merely a “disk drive company,” which may prevent
customers from fully appreciating the nuances of ActiveScale.

■ Upgrades of Active Archive, Western Digital’s previous generation object storage product, to
ActiveScale require forklift upgrades, as no seamless upgrade methods exist due to the near
complete rewrite of the product between generations.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor’s
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added
■ Pure Storage: The Pure Storage FlashBlade product is now meeting the general availability and
revenue inclusion criteria.

■ Inspur: Inspur AS13000 has more than 20 deployments in EMEA and is now meeting the inclusion
criterion for being deployed in at least two geographical areas.

Dropped
■ StorageCraft (Exablox): This vendor is North America-focused and does not satisfy the new 2018
Gartner criterion of having more than 20 deployments outside of primary geography.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion, vendors must meet all of the following requirements:

■ Revenue should be above $10 million per year for the distributed file systems and/or object
storage product between 1 May 2017 through 30 April 2018, or should have at least 50 production
customers each consuming more than 500 TB capacity through distributed file or object storage
protocols only. Vendor must provide reference materials to support this criterion.

■ The product must be installed in at least three major geographies. Vendor will provide evidence of
a minimum of 20 production customers brought to revenue in each of at least two major
geographies (North America, EMEA, Asia/Pacific and South America).

■ The product should be deployed across three use cases that are outlined in “Critical Capabilities
for Object Storage” and “Critical Capabilities for Distributed File Systems.”

■ The product must be designed for primarily on-premises workloads and not as a pass-through
solution where data will be permanently stored elsewhere.

■ The vendor should own the storage software intellectual property and be a product developer. If a
product is built on top of open-source software, the vendor must be one of the top 10 active
contributors to the community (in terms of code contribution).

■ The vendor must have a solution commercially available for at least one calendar year prior to
publication of this research (general availability before 20 October 20 2017).

Packaging:
■ The product must be delivered as either an appliance or software-based solution.

■ The product must be available for purchase as a stand-alone storage product, and not an
integrated, converged or hyperconverged system with compute and hypervisor bundle.

Product capabilities:

The product must have:

■ File and/or object access to the common namespace/file system.

■ A shared-nothing architecture where data is replicated or erasure coded over the network across
multiple nodes in the cluster. The product must also have the ability to handle disk, enclosure or
node failures in a graceful manner without impacting availability.

■ A single file system capable of expanding beyond 500 TB.

■ A global namespace capable of 2 PB expansion.

■ A cluster that spans more than four nodes.

■ Support for horizontal scaling of capacity and throughput in a cluster mode or in independent node
additions with a global namespace/file system.

Vendors to Watch
The following vendors did not meet the criteria for inclusion in the Magic Quadrant, but may be
worthy of consideration as they are starting to get more traction in the unstructured data storage
market:

■ Elastifile

■ Hedvig

■ Igneous Systems

■ MapR

■ Minio

■ Nexenta

■ Nutanix

■ Rozo Systems
■ WekaIO

Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
We analyze the vendor’s capabilities across broad business functions. Ability to Execute reflects the
market conditions and, to a large degree, it is our analysis and interpretation of what we hear from
the market. Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems,
methods or procedures that enable IT provider performance to be competitive, efficient and effective,
and to positively impact revenue, retention and reputation within Gartner’s view of the market.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability High

Sales Execution/Pricing Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record High

Marketing Execution Low

Customer Experience High

Operations Low

Source: Gartner (October 2018)

Completeness of Vision
Completeness of Vision distills a vendor’s view of the future, the direction of the market and the
vendor’s role in shaping that market. We expect the vendor’s vision to be compatible with our view of
the market’s evolution. A vendor’s vision of the evolution of the data center and the expanding role of
distributed file and object storage are important criteria. In contrast with how we measure Ability to
Execute criteria, the rating for Completeness of Vision is based on direct vendor interactions, and on
our analysis of the vendor’s view of the future.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

 Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Low

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Medium

Source: Gartner (October 2018)

Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have the highest scores for their Ability to Execute and
Completeness of Vision. A vendor in the Leaders quadrant has the market share, credibility, and
marketing and sales capabilities needed to drive the acceptance of new technologies. Market leaders
will typically be able to execute strongly across multiple geographies with products that cover both
distributed file systems and object storage offerings. They will also have consistent financial
performance, broad platform support and flexible deployment models.

Challengers
Challengers are typically vendors with proven global presence and market achievement that only
target a narrower subset of the market, or have not yet established themselves across the broader
market for both distributed file systems and object storage areas. They have strong products, as well
as sufficient credible market position and resources to sustain continued growth in the future, but
currently fall behind on influence and thought leadership for this market segment.

Visionaries
These are typically vendors that are focusing on strong innovation and product differentiation, but are
smaller vendors with limited reach or achievement to date, or larger vendors with innovation
programs that are still unproven. A vendor in the Visionaries quadrant delivers innovative products
that address operationally or financially important end-user problems on a broad scale, but has not
demonstrated the ability to capture market share or sustainable profitability.

Niche Players
Many distributed file system or object storage vendors will address a more narrow market niche, or
they may be vendors with market programs that have not yet established their differentiation and/or
execution ability. However, Niche Player vendors may address their specific market category and
excel by focusing on specific market or vertical segments.

Context
This Magic Quadrant represents vendors that sell products for unstructured data growth for
enterprise data centers. The distributed file system and object storage market emerged as a
response to the tremendous increase in unstructured data generation that is fueled by new business
requirements. To address it, the storage platform has to be based on a scale-out software approach
to enable seamless data growth with a strong emphasis on long-term data efficiency for cost
optimization. I&O leaders seek distributed scale-out storage products to build new platforms based
on software-defined approaches where performance comes from hardware innovation of a
commodity hardware layer, and data resiliency comes from a scale-out software layer where data is
distributed across multiple nodes.

Across many products in this market, vendors are providing appliances, software-only products and
preintegrated storage systems to fit the needs of the different deployment strategies of enterprise
end users. In addition, some of those products in the market are also enabling hybrid cloud
workflows and being deployed in public cloud IaaS.

As the distributed file system and object storage market matures, storage software and hardware
vendors are expanding their product portfolios to provide more differentiated and agile offerings.
New consumption models and procurement offerings are emerging to provide end users with
different ways to purchase storage. Advances in software technology and the commoditization of the
hardware will make it possible for I&O leaders to enjoy web-scale economics and scalability of the
storage platform for unstructured data growth of bimodal IT.

Market Overview
The markets for distributed file systems and object storage are actively merging. That is the reason
Gartner publishes a single Magic Quadrant on the combined segments —- it will eventually be one
market. The distinctions between the two segments are slowly blurring, but the buyers are already
treating it as one market and requiring both file and object access for unstructured dataset solutions.

Enterprises are often deciding between public cloud and on-premises infrastructure for given
workloads. Organizational culture and sensitivity to security and governance mandates are typically
the leading factors that enterprises consider when deciding whether to move applications and data
to the public cloud or to keep them on-premises.

When customers choose to keep the applications and data on-premises, they are increasingly
choosing between products such as Dell EMC Isilon and IBM Cloud Object Storage for large sets of
unstructured data. In many cases, customers seeking solutions in this market would be better-suited
with a single product that has file and object personalities, so workloads can seamlessly interact with
data using the most appropriate protocol for the specific task and environment.

Startups and Innovation

Formerly risk-averse enterprises have become receptive to buying from storage startups that are
using clean-sheet designs and a wealth of knowledge to build more efficient systems. This is
illustrated by the popularity of products such as solid-state arrays, hyperconverged infrastructure
(HCI), distributed file systems and object storage.

Many large incumbent vendors are repositioning their distributed file systems for emerging AI
workloads while we are also seeing several emerging vendors specifically tackling performance,
scale and deployment flexibility improvement required for large-scale training and inference AI ML
workloads.

Choice in Deployment
The vendors in the market for distributed file systems and object storage are offering mixed
deployment options to give customers choices in how they deploy infrastructure. Common
deployment options include turnkey appliances or software-only options that can be deployed either
on bare-metal industry-standard hardware as virtual machines or on Docker containers. Increasingly,
vendors in this market are offering their products as software-defined storage precertified to run on
x86 industry-standard hardware.

Amazon S3 API Standardization

The current object storage segment can be thought of as a two-sided market: There are providers of
object storage protocols and consumers of these protocols consisting of applications. There were
more providers than consumers until the Amazon S3 API became the de facto standard for object
storage. Vendors deploying object storage platforms in enterprise data centers adopted Amazon S3,
a protocol mainly used in the public cloud, because of the developer community that formed around
it. Now there are many consumers and providers, all using Amazon S3. The object storage market is
finally in equilibrium.

The interest in using public cloud services such as AWS has brought customer awareness to the
object storage market. Software developers building Mode 2 web and mobile applications are
sometimes asked to repatriate these applications back to enterprise data centers. Enterprise IT
seeks control of applications and data, while software developers seek novel and efficient ways of
programmatically interacting with infrastructure. The market for on-premises object storage products
solves both of these.

Hybrid Cloud Storage

The current unstructured storage market is evolving to embrace hybrid cloud workflows and
capabilities as IT leaders are looking to take advantage of public cloud agility, efficiency and cloud
computing capabilities. In 2018, Gartner saw more evidence of vendors not just adding tiering to the
public cloud, but also enabling new use cases to leverage public cloud for rendering and analytics,
and enabling application data bidirectional sharing between on-premises and public cloud locations.

Evidence
Placement on the Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage is based on
Gartner’s view of a vendor’s performance against the criteria noted in this research. Gartner’s view on
vendor placement on the Magic Quadrant is heavily influenced by more than 1,500 inquiries and one-
on-one meetings with Gartner clients regarding object storage and distributed file system solutions,
conducted since the publication of the last Magic Quadrant. Gartner also utilizes worldwide end-user
surveys, Gartner conference kiosk surveys, Gartner conference session polling data, gartner.com
Research Circle polls and Gartner Peer Insights. The Magic Quadrant methodology includes the
solicitation of references from each vendor; for this Magic Quadrant, Gartner conducted over 140
reference checks (via electronic survey) from a set of customers provided by each vendor. The
included vendors’ submitted comprehensive responses to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant survey on this
topic, which were used as the basis for subsequent vendor briefings and follow-up meetings, product
demonstrations, and correspondence.

Additionally, this research drew input from other Gartner analysts, industry contacts and public
sources, such as U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, articles, speeches, published
papers and public domain videos.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This
includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered
natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in
the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the
financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business
unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the
state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the
overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve

competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market
dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the
organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the
quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other
vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate
those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and
understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout

the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and
positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of
market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and
future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
 Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital
for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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