Hype Cycle For Storage Techn 302826

G00302826
Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2016

Published: 5 July 2016
Analyst(s): Pushan Rinnen, Julia Palmer
This Hype Cycle evaluates storage-related hardware and software

technologies in terms of their business impact, adoption rate and maturity
level to help users decide where and when to invest.
Table of Contents
Analysis.................................................................................................................................................. 3
What You Need to Know.................................................................................................................. 3
The Hype Cycle................................................................................................................................ 3
The Priority Matrix.............................................................................................................................5
Off the Hype Cycle........................................................................................................................... 6
On the Rise...................................................................................................................................... 7
Shared Accelerated Storage....................................................................................................... 7
Cloud Data Backup.................................................................................................................... 8
Management SDS.................................................................................................................... 10
File Analysis.............................................................................................................................. 12
At the Peak.....................................................................................................................................13
Data Backup Tools for Mobile Devices...................................................................................... 13
Open-Source Storage...............................................................................................................14
Copy Data Management...........................................................................................................16
Information Dispersal Algorithms...............................................................................................17
Integrated Systems: Hyperconvergence................................................................................... 18
Infrastructure SDS.................................................................................................................... 20
Solid-State DIMMs....................................................................................................................22
Sliding Into the Trough.................................................................................................................... 24
Integrated Backup Appliances.................................................................................................. 24
Data Sanitization.......................................................................................................................25
Object Storage......................................................................................................................... 27
Storage Cluster File Systems.................................................................................................... 28
Cross-Platform Structured Data Archiving.................................................................................29
Emerging Data Storage Protection Schemes............................................................................ 31
Enterprise Endpoint Backup..................................................................................................... 32
Hybrid DIMMs...........................................................................................................................34
Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery......................................................................................35
Cloud Storage Gateway............................................................................................................37
Disaster Recovery as a Service.................................................................................................38
Public Cloud Storage................................................................................................................40
Online Data Compression......................................................................................................... 41
Climbing the Slope......................................................................................................................... 42
SaaS Archiving of Messaging Data........................................................................................... 42
Storage Multitenancy................................................................................................................ 44
Solid-State Arrays.....................................................................................................................45
Automatic Storage Tiering........................................................................................................ 47
Enterprise Information Archiving................................................................................................49
Data Deduplication................................................................................................................... 50
Network-Based Replication Appliances.................................................................................... 52
Continuous Data Protection......................................................................................................53
External Storage Virtualization...................................................................................................55
Entering the Plateau....................................................................................................................... 57
EFSS........................................................................................................................................ 57
Appendixes.................................................................................................................................... 58
Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels.......................................................... 60
Gartner Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................... 61
List of Tables
Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases................................................................................................................. 60

Table 2. Benefit Ratings........................................................................................................................ 60
Table 3. Maturity Levels........................................................................................................................ 61
List of Figures
Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2016.............................................................................4

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Storage Technologies, 2016......................................................................... 6
Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2015...........................................................................59
Page 2 of 62 Gartner, Inc. | G00302826

Analysis
What You Need to Know
This year's Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies adds four new profiles. The previous software-
defined storage (SDS) profile has been split into two profiles: infrastructure SDS and management
SDS. Infrastructure SDS has replaced and expanded on the technology profile formerly called
"virtual storage appliance." Management SDS was created to feature software products that enable
automated and optimized storage resource management and storage virtualization, with I/O
optimization as a subcategory, but no longer a separate technology profile. Another new profile —
shared accelerated storage — presents an emerging storage architecture where nonvolatile memory
such as flash is used to scale out to form a central storage pool for dozens of compute clients that
require very high performance and ultra-low latency. Last, but not least, cloud data backup was
created to focus on emerging backup products that protect data generated in the cloud, replacing
the previous profile for cloud-based backup services, which primarily focused on backup as a
service.
The Hype Cycle

Gartner's Hype Cycle illustrates the typical life cycle that a new storage technology goes through
before it reaches mainstream adoption. The technologies that have moved the farthest along the
Hype Cycle curve in the past year include enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS), online
data compression and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), the profile name of which has been
changed from "cloud-based disaster recovery services." EFSS technologies have become mature,
with two orthogonal directions: either data infrastructure modernization or modern content
collaboration and business enablement. Online data compression has been well-adopted in backup
target appliances as well as primary storage arrays, especially solid-state arrays (SSAs). DRaaS is
now being offered by more than 250 providers, with production service instances more than
doubled in the past year. SSAs continue seeing fast user adoption in the past year and also sizable
movement on the Hype Cycle. Hyperconverged integrated systems have reached the peak of the
Hype Cycle, with 5% to 20% target market penetration.
High-profile technologies with high and transformational business impacts tend to reach their Hype
Cycle peak and trough quickly, while low-profile technologies or technologies with low or moderate
business impact could move much more slowly on the curve, and sometimes may never reach their
peak before approaching the Trough of Disillusionment or becoming obsolete. Examples of fast-
moving and high-impact technologies associated with storage include data deduplication, SSAs
and hyperconverged integrated systems. Examples of slow-moving technologies with moderate
business impact include appliance-based replication and storage multitenancy (see Figure 1).
Business impact may change during the life cycle of the technology.
Gartner, Inc. | G00302826 Page 3 of 62

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2016
expectations
Information Dispersal
Integrated Systems: Hyperconvergence
Algorithms
Copy Data Management Infrastructure SDS
Open-Source Storage Solid-State DIMMs
Data Backup Tools for Mobile Devices

Integrated Backup Appliances
File Analysis Data Sanitization
Object Storage
EFSS
Storage Cluster File Systems
Management SDS
External Storage Virtualization
Cross-Platform Structured
Data Archiving Continuous Data Protection
Cloud Data Backup
Emerging Data Storage Network-Based Replication Appliances
Protection Schemes Data Deduplication
Shared Accelerated Storage Enterprise Information Archiving
Enterprise Endpoint
Backup Automatic Storage Tiering
Solid-State Arrays
Hybrid DIMMs
Storage Multitenancy
Virtual Machine Backup
and Recovery SaaS Archiving of Messaging Data
Online Data Compression
Cloud Storage Gateway
Public Cloud Storage
Disaster Recovery as a Service As of July 2016
Peak of
Innovation Trough of Plateau of
Inflated Slope of Enlightenment
Trigger Disillusionment Productivity
Expectations
time
Years to mainstream adoption: obsolete
less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years before plateau
Source: Gartner (July 2016)

The Priority Matrix
The Priority Matrix maps the benefit rating for each technology against the length of time before
Gartner expects it to reach the beginning of mainstream adoption. This alternative perspective can
help users determine how to prioritize their storage hardware and storage software technology
investments and adoption. In general, companies should begin with technologies that are rated
transformational in business benefits and are likely to reach mainstream adoption quickly. These
technologies tend to have the most dramatic impact on business processes, revenue or cost-
cutting efforts. Infrastructure SDS's business benefit is now elevated to transformational as
organizations start to realize cost savings.
After these transformational technologies, users are advised to evaluate high-impact technologies
that will reach mainstream adoption status in the near term, and work downward and to the right
from there. This year, two new technology profiles have high business benefit ratings: cloud data
backup and shared accelerated storage. Information dispersal algorithms' benefit is raised to "high"
this year, as it is implemented in more storage arrays, hyperconverged systems and SDS.
Figure 2 shows where the storage technologies evaluated in this year's Hype Cycle fall on the
Priority Matrix. Note that this is Gartner's generic evaluation; each organization's graph will differ
based on its specific circumstances and goals.

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Storage Technologies, 2016
benefit years to mainstream adoption

less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years
transformational Solid-State Arrays Data Deduplication Infrastructure SDS
high Continuous Data Enterprise Endpoint Cloud Data Backup

Protection Backup
Copy Data Management
EFSS Enterprise Information
Archiving File Analysis
Integrated Systems: Information Dispersal

Hyperconvergence Algorithms
Object Storage Management SDS
Online Data Compression Open-Source Storage
Public Cloud Storage Shared Accelerated

Storage
Storage Cluster File
Systems
Virtual Machine Backup
and Recovery
moderate Disaster Recovery as a Automatic Storage Tiering Emerging Data Storage

Service Protection Schemes
Cross-Platform Structured
Data Archiving
Data Backup Tools for
Mobile Devices
Data Sanitization
External Storage
Virtualization
Hybrid DIMMs
Integrated Backup
Appliances
Network-Based
Replication Appliances
SaaS Archiving of
Messaging Data
Solid-State DIMMs
low
As of July 2016
Off the Hype Cycle

Technologies that have fallen off the chart because of high maturity and widespread adoption may
still be discussed in the related Gartner IT Market Clock research. The following technology profiles
have been retired or replaced in this year's Hype Cycle:

■ Cloud-based backup services: This profile has been replaced with a new profile called "cloud
data backup" to focus on technologies protecting cloud-native data, instead of backup-as-a-
service technologies.
■ Data encryption technologies, HDDs and SSDs: This technology has failed to be widely adopted
by storage arrays due to a performance penalty.
■ FCoE: Development for this technology has been discontinued.
■ I/O optimization: This technology has been merged into management SDS.
■ Linear tape file systems: This technology is commonly supported by tape libraries.
■ Software-defined storage: This profile has been split into two separate profiles: infrastructure
SDS and management SDS.
■ Virtual storage appliance: This technology has been merged into infrastructure SDS.
On the Rise
Shared Accelerated Storage

Analysis By: Julia Palmer
Definition: Shared accelerated storage is an architecture that has been designed to tackle new
data-intensive workloads by bringing high-performance and high-density next-generation solid-
state-shared storage to the compute servers over a low-latency network. This technology delivers
benefits of shared storage with performance of server-side flash by leveraging standardized
Nonvolatile Memory Express (NVMe) Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe)- super-
low-latency technology.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Shared accelerated storage is an emerging

architecture that takes advantage of the latest nonvolatile memory, currently flash technology, to
address the needs of extreme-low-latency workloads. This technology is fast-evolving and replacing
server-side flash used to accelerate workloads at the compute layer, but it has limited capacity and
is managed as a silo on a server-per-server basis. Unlike server-attached flash storage, shared
accelerated storage can scale out to high capacity, uses ultra-dense flash, has high availability
features and can be managed from a central location serving dozens of compute clients. Current
shared accelerated storage specs are promising to deliver over 1 million input/output operations per
second (IOPS) per 1 unit of the rack space. Shared accelerated storage is nascent technology with
just a few vendors and products entering the market. It is expected to grow as the cost of flash
continues to decline. Expect it to be delivered as a stand-alone product or as part of a converged
integrated systems infrastructure offering in the next five years.
User Advice: Shared accelerated storage products feature disaggregated compute and storage
architecture that allows flash memory acceleration to be deployed centrally and accessed by many
servers connected via high-bandwidth, low-latency networks. The typical design would have
dozens of high-capacity PCIe-based flash modules forming a single pool of storage that presented

to servers over NVMe over fabric network. NVMe fabric technology provides low-latency access to
the shared storage resource pool by avoiding overhead associated with traditional protocol
translation. Shared accelerated storage products will appeal to the most demanding workloads that
require extreme performance, storage persistency, ultra-low latency and compact form factor.
Today, shared accelerated storage aims at extremely-high-performance and big data analytics
workloads, such as applications built on top of Hadoop, and in-memory database use cases, such
as SAP Hana. While the benefits of 10 times higher IOPS and five times lower latency than industry-
leading solid-state arrays are very attractive for Tier 0 high-performance computing (HPC), the
technology is currently in the beginning stages of adoption, thus cost and capacity are inhibiting
mass deployment. In the next five years — as adoption accelerates, awareness increases and the
price point drops — any application that benefits from ultra-low-latency persistent storage can take
advantage of this architecture. Buyers need to be aware that nonvolatile memory technology is
evolving, and solution architecture must be flexible to the newest, most effective technology, like 3D
XPoint. The most prominent use cases for shared accelerated storage will be online transaction
processing (OLTP) databases, data mining, real-time analytics, HPC applications for video editing,
financial processing and analyses, online trading, oil and gas exploration, genomic research, and
fraud detection.
Business Impact: Shared accelerated storage can have dramatic impact on business cases where
large bandwidth, high IOPS and low-latency requirements are critical to the bottom line of the
enterprise. It is designed to power emerging Tier 0 workloads like: enterprise analytics; real-time,
big data analyses; and high-volume transactions that require high performance, capacity and
availability where you need an architecture that extends beyond modern general purpose solid-state
arrays. While it requires some retooling on the compute side (PCIe/NVMe) to integrate with this type
of storage, its benefits are likely to attract high-performance computing customers that will be able
to show positive ROI. Unlikely to be relevant as general purpose storage, it's targeted at analytics
and transactional workloads where low latency is a crucial requirement and a business differentiator.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: E8 Storage; EMC; Mangstor; X-IO Technologies; Zstor
Recommended Reading: "Vendor Rating: EMC"
"Market Guide for In-Memory Computing Technologies"
"Market Trends: The Next-Generation Server-Side SSD Landscape"
Cloud Data Backup

Analysis By: Pushan Rinnen; Robert Rhame
Definition: Cloud data backup refers to policy-based backup tools that can back up and restore
data generated natively in the cloud. Such data could be generated by software as a service (SaaS)

applications, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce, or by infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
compute services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Backup of data generated natively in public cloud is
an emerging requirement as more and more organizations realize that cloud providers are not
responsible for data loss, even when data is generated in the cloud. SaaS applications' native data
protection capabilities are typically limited but free of charge (although there may be a charge for a
large restore), while native backup of IaaS usually resorts to snapshots and scripting, and incurs
additional cost in storage. Small backup vendors have existed for a few years, offering backup of
SaaS applications (primarily Salesforce and Google Apps) to another cloud location; some of them
were acquired by larger vendors. As Microsoft Office 365 gains more momentum, Office 365 backup
capabilities start to emerge as well. IaaS data backup is a more nascent area to cater to
organizations' need to back up data when they move production applications to the IaaS cloud.
User Advice: Before migrating on-premises applications to SaaS or IaaS, organizations should
ensure that data generated in the cloud has enough protection and recoverability to meet their data
protection requirements. They should assess the native backup capabilities within an IaaS
infrastructure and a SaaS application and any associated additional cost. They should ensure that
their contract with the cloud provider clearly specifies the capabilities and cost associated with the
following items in terms of native data protection:
■ Backup/restore methods: This area is to measure how backup and restore are done, whether a
backup is application consistent, and if a backup can capture all the relevant data with
protection requirements. Restore capabilities should include descriptions on how and what
users can restore themselves.
■ Retention period: This is to measure how long cloud providers can retain native backups free of
charge or with additional cost.
■ Service-level agreements (SLAs) on recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective
(RTO): RPO measures how frequently data is backed up natively in the same cloud
infrastructure to gauge the data loss window. RTO measures how long it takes to restore at
different granular levels such as a file, a mailbox or an entire application.
■ Additional storage cost due to backup: Insist on concrete guidelines on how much storage
IaaS's native snapshots will consume, so that organizations can predict backup storage cost.
If organizations find the cloud-native data protection is insufficient, they should evaluate third-party
backup tools, focusing on application consistency, process automation, backup retention,
performance and backup location flexibility. See the sample vendor list for examples of third-party
vendors.
Business Impact: As more production workloads migrate to the cloud (either in the form of SaaS or
IaaS), it has become critical to protect data generated natively in the cloud. SaaS and IaaS
providers typically offer infrastructure resiliency and availability to protect their system or site failure.
However, when data is lost due to their infrastructure failure, the providers are not financially
responsible for the value of lost data but only provide limited credit for the period of downtime.

When data is lost due to user errors, software corruption or malicious attacks, user organizations
are fully responsible themselves. The more critical cloud-generated data is, the more critical it is for
users to provide recoverability of such data.
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Asigra; Commvault; Datos IO; Datto; Druva; EMC; Microsoft; N2W Software;
Nakivo; OwnBackup
Recommended Reading: "You May Need Additional Backup to Prevent Data Loss From Your SaaS
Solutions"
"Data Backup/Recovery Factors to Consider When Adopting SaaS"
Management SDS
Analysis By: Julia Palmer; Dave Russell
Definition: Management software-defined storage (SDS) coordinates the delivery of storage

services to enable greater storage agility. It can be deployed as an out-of-band technology with
robust policy management, I/O optimization and automation functions to configure, manage and
provision other storage resources. Management SDS products enable abstraction, mobility,
virtualization, SRM and I/O optimization of storage resources to reduce expenses, making external
storage virtualization software products a subset of management SDS category.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: While management SDS is still largely a vision, it is a
powerful notion that could revolutionize storage architectural approaches and storage consumption
models over time. The concept of abstracting and separating physical or virtual storage services via
bifurcating the control plane (action signals) regarding storage from the data plane (how data
actually flows) is foundational to SDS. This is achieved largely through programmable interfaces
(such as APIs), which are still evolving. SDS requests will negotiate capabilities through software
that, in turn, will translate those capabilities into storage services that meet a defined policy or SLA.
Storage virtualization abstracts storage resources, which is foundational to SDS, whereas the
concepts of policy-based automation and orchestration — possibly triggered and managed by
applications and hypervisors — are key differentiators between simple virtualization and SDS.
The goal of SDS is to deliver greater business value than traditional implementations via better
linkage of storage to the rest of IT, improved agility and cost optimization. This is achieved through
policy management, such that automation and storage administration are simplified with less
manual oversight required, which allows larger storage capacity to be managed with fewer people.
Due to its hardware-agnostic nature, management SDS products are more likely to provide deep
capability for data mobility between private and public clouds to enable a hybrid cloud enterprise
strategy.

User Advice: Gartner's opinion is that management SDS is targeting end-user use cases where the
ultimate goal is to improve or extend existing storage capabilities. However, value propositions and
leading use cases of management SDS are not clear, as the technology itself is fragmented by many
categories. The software-defined storage market is still in a formative stage, with many vendors
entering and exiting the marketplace and tackling different SDS use cases. When looking at different
products, identify and focus on use case applicable to your enterprise, and investigate each product
for its capabilities.
Gartner recommends proof of concept (POC) implementations to determine suitability for broader
deployment.
Top reasons for interest in SDS, as gathered from interactions with Gartner clients, include:
■ Improving the management and agility of the overall storage infrastructure through better
programmability, interoperability, automation and orchestration
■ Storage virtualization and abstraction
■ Performance improvement by optimizing and aggregating storage I/O
■ Better linkage of storage to the rest of IT and the software-defined data center
■ Operating expenditure (opex) reductions by reducing the demands of administrators
■ Capital expenditure (capex) reductions from more efficient utilization of existing storage systems
Despite the promise of SDS, there are potential problems with some storage point solutions that
have been rebranded as SDS to present a higher value proposition versus built-in storage features,
and it needs to be carefully examined for ROI benefits.
Business Impact: Management SDS's ultimate value is to provide broad capability in the policy
management and orchestration of many storage resources. While some management SDS products
are focusing on enabling provisioning and automation of storage resources, more comprehensive
solutions feature robust utilization and management of heterogeneous storage services, allowing
mobility between different types of storage platforms on-premises and in the cloud. As a subset of
management SDS, I/O optimization SDS products can reduce storage response times, improve
storage resource utilization and control costs by deferring major infrastructure upgrades. The
benefits of management SDS are in improved operational efficiency by unifying storage
management practices and providing common layers across different storage technologies. The
operational ROI of management SDS will depend on IT leaders' ability to quantify the impact of
improved ongoing data management, increased operational excellence and reduction of opex.
Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Atlantis Computing; DataCore Software; EMC; FalconStor; ioFABRIC; IBM;
Infinio; PernixData; Primary Data; VMware
Recommended Reading: "Top Five Use Cases and Benefits of Software-Defined Storage"
"Innovation Insight: Separating Hype From Hope for Software-Defined Storage"
"Technology Overview for I/O Optimization Software"
"Multivendor SDS: A Complex and Costly Myth"
"Should Your Enterprise Deploy a Software-Defined Data Center?"
File Analysis
Analysis By: Alan Dayley
Definition: File analysis (FA) tools analyze, index, search, track and report on file metadata and, in
some cases (e.g., in unstructured data environments), on file content. FA tools are usually offered as
software options. FA tools report on file attributes and provide detailed metadata and contextual
information to enable better information governance and data management actions.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: FA is an emerging technology that assists

organizations in understanding the ever-growing repository of unstructured "dark" data, including
file shares, email databases, SharePoint, enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) and cloud platforms
such as Microsoft Office 365. Metadata reports include data owner, location, duplicate copies, size,
last accessed or modified, file types and custom metadata. The primary use cases for FA for
unstructured data environments include but are not limited to: organizational efficiency and cost
optimization; information governance and analytics; and risk mitigation. The desire to mitigate
business risks (including security and privacy risks), identify sensitive data, optimize storage cost
and implement information governance are some of the key factors driving the adoption of FA. The
identification, classification, migration, protection, remediation and disposition of data are key
features of FA tools.
User Advice: Organizations should use FA to better understand their unstructured data, including
where it resides and who has access to it. Data visualization maps created by FA can be presented
to other parts of the organization and be used to better identify the value and risk of the data,
enabling IT, line of business and compliance organizations to make better-informed decisions
regarding classification, information governance, storage management and content migration. Once
known, redundant, outdated and trivial data can be defensibly deleted, and retention policies can be
applied to other data.
Business Impact: FA tools reduce risk by identifying which files reside where and who has access
to them. They support remediation in such areas as the elimination or quarantining of sensitive data,
identifying and protecting intellectual property, and finding and eliminating redundant and outdated
data that may lead to unnecessary business risk. FA shrinks costs by reducing the amount of data
stored. It also classifies valuable business data so that it can be more easily leveraged and

analyzed, and it supports e-discovery efforts for legal and regulatory investigations. In addition, FA
products feed data into corporate retention initiatives by using file attributes.
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Acaveo; Active Navigation; Bloomberg; Controle; Hewlett Packard Enterprise;
IBM-StoredIQ; Kazoup; STEALTHbits Technologies; Varonis; Veritas
Recommended Reading: "Market Guide for File Analysis Software"
"Organizations Will Need to Tackle Three Challenges to Curb Unstructured Data Glut and Neglect"
"How to Move From Data Negligence to Effective Storage Management"
"Information Governance Gets Real: Four Case Studies Show the Way Out of Information Chaos"
"Save Millions in Storage Costs With These Effective Data Management Best Practices"
At the Peak
Data Backup Tools for Mobile Devices

Analysis By: John Girard
Definition: This technology profile describes tools and services that back up and restore mobile
device data. Backups may be made via a cable (that is, tethered) or over the internet to a server
hosted at a company site or a cloud service provider. Restoration of some user data, but usually not
the entire system image, is accomplished after loss, theft or migration.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Mobile device providers offer free-to-inexpensive
cloud sync and share services that can be used to back up and restore parts of user data and
configuration profiles. These services, along with enterprise file share and sync (EFSS) tools, provide
convenient but often unmanaged and incomplete backups that are unlikely to meet business
recovery, security and privacy requirements. Enterprise-grade tools may be expensive, and the
results are inconsistent because mobile OSs are typically sandboxed and APIs for managing mobile
content are limited and inconsistent across different mobile OSs. If budgets are limited and
complexity is a barrier, the buyer may simply choose to take their chances with sync tools. The pre-
Peak status indicates that companies increasingly realize they need mobile backup, but lack robust
product and service choices.
User Advice: Users of both company devices and personal devices are responsible for ensuring
that important business data is preserved, given the inconsistency of current backup methods and
the chaotic effects of distributed mobile information storage. In typical circumstances where a

restoration is needed, users may have access to more than one copy of the same calendar,
contacts and emails for some period of time simultaneously from a workstation, tablet and phone,
because of persistent storage of the inbox and to certain files which had been placed in cloud
storage. Companies should get in the habit of archiving copies of important information as part of
normal workflow design, and should provide attractive choices for EFSS and backup solutions that
meet business security requirements. Users must be directed to get in the habit of regularly backing
up critical business information or face the consequences.
Business Impact: IT planners should document best and worst practices for mobile backups, and
tie the recommendations into their business continuity plans, training programs and help desk
procedures. EFSS tools are a partial solution, but they may not meet business security and privacy
requirements and are not designed for managing structured backups. Left on their own, users will
prefer free or inexpensive services lacking company-controlled encryption, where ownership of and
future access to stored data may fall into the hands of the storage vendor. Neither EFSS nor
enterprise backup systems are yet suited to comprehensively back up mobile devices; however,
long-term plans should prioritize centrally managed, certified, professional-grade tools. Recent
debates over the need for and use of legally mandated back doors raise scenarios where
companies could completely lose disclosure control over confidential information. A solid backup
solution can help companies to comply promptly with information requests, before they become
subject to blanket search demands.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Acronis; Asigra; Carbonite; Citrix ShareFile; Code42; Commvault; Datacastle;
Druva; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; IDrive
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing"
"Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances"
"The Smartphone Backdoor Debate Puts Your Company's Confidentiality Rights at Risk"
"Make Self-Service Backup and Recovery a Reality for Enterprise Applications"
"Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Endpoint Backup"
Open-Source Storage
Analysis By: Arun Chandrasekaran
Definition: Open-source storage is core storage software that is used to create a storage array, as
well as data protection and management software. It involves software abstracted from the
underlying hardware for which the source code is made available to the public through free license.

Similar to proprietary storage, open-source storage software supports primary, secondary and
tertiary storage tiers, as well as heterogeneous management.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Although open-source storage has been around for a
long time, it has been mainly relegated to file-serving and backup deployments in small business
environments. Products such as FreeNAS (TrueNAS for business environments), Openfiler and
Amanda have been in use for many years. Recent innovations in multicore processors and CPU
core density, combined with an innovative open-source ecosystem, are making open-source
storage attractive for cloud and big data workloads and as a potential alternative to proprietary
storage. As cloud computing, big data analytics and information archiving push the capacity, pricing
and performance frontiers of traditional scale-up storage architectures, there has been renewed
interest in open-source software (OSS) as a means to achieve high scalability in capacity and
performance at lower acquisition costs.
The rise of open-source platforms such as Apache Hadoop and OpenStack, which are backed by
large, innovative communities of developers and vendors, together with the entry of disruptive
vendors such as Red Hat (Gluster Storage, Ceph Storage) and Intel (Lustre), is enabling enterprises
to seriously consider open-source storage for use cases such as cloud storage, big data and
archiving. More vendors are also bringing products to market based on the popular OpenZFS
project. There has been a growing number of open-source storage projects for container-based
storage such as Flocker and Minio.
User Advice: Although open-source storage offers a less-expensive upfront alternative to

proprietary storage, IT leaders need to measure the benefits, risks and costs accurately. Some
enterprise IT organizations overstate the benefits and understate the costs and risks. Conversely,
with the emerging maturity of open-source storage solutions, enterprise IT buyers should not
overlook the value proposition of these solutions. IT leaders should actively deploy pilot projects,
identify internal champions, train storage teams and prepare the overall organization for this
disruptive trend. Although source code can be downloaded for free, it is advisable to use a
commercial distribution and obtain support through a vendor, because OSS requires significant
effort and expertise to install, maintain and support. Customers deploying "open core" or
"freemium" storage products need to carefully evaluate the strength of lock-in against the perceived
benefits. This is a model in which the vendor provides proprietary software — in the form of add-on
modules or management tools — that functions on top of OSS.
In most cases, open-source storage is not general-purpose storage. Therefore, choose use cases
that leverage the strengths of open-source platforms — for example, batch processing or a low-
cost archive for Hadoop and test/development private cloud for OpenStack — and use them
appropriately. It is important to focus on hardware design and choose cost-effective reference
architectures that have been certified by the vendors and for which support is delivered in an
integrated manner. Overall, on-premises integration, management automation and customer
support should be key priorities when selecting open-source storage solutions.
Business Impact: Open-source storage is playing an important role in enabling cost-effective,

scalable platforms for new cloud and big data workloads. Gartner is seeing rapid adoption among
technology firms and service providers, as well as in research and academic environments. Big data

and private cloud use cases in enterprises are also promising use cases for open-source storage,
where Gartner is witnessing keen interest. As data continues to grow at a frantic pace, open-source
storage will enable customers to store and maintain data, particularly unstructured data, at a lower
acquisition cost, with "good enough" availability, performance and manageability.
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Cloudera; ClusterHQ; Hortonworks; iXsystems; IBM; Micro Focus International;
OpenStack; Pivotal Labs; Red Hat; SwiftStack
Recommended Reading: "Market Guide for Open-Source Storage"
"I&O Leaders Can Benefit From Storage Industry Innovation"
"Should I Use Open Source in My Infrastructure?"
Copy Data Management

Analysis By: Pushan Rinnen; Garth Landers
Definition: Copy data management (CDM) refers to products that capture application-consistent
data via snapshots in primary storage and create a live "golden image" in a secondary storage
system where virtual copies in native disk format can be mounted for use cases such as backup/
recovery or test/development. Support for heterogeneous primary storage is an essential
component. Different CDM products have different additional data management capabilities.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Copy data management (CDM) has become a hyped
term as various vendors start to use it to promote their product capabilities. CDM awareness and
buying cycles are increasing. Some storage array vendors use the term to describe their array-
internal capabilities, which don't fit into Gartner's definition in terms of heterogeneous primary array
support. CDM adoption continues to focus on two areas: (1) consolidated backup and disaster
recovery and (2) test/development workflow automation. New products tend to focus more on the
first use case. The main challenge faced by CDM products is being leveraged across these two very
different use cases, as these represent very different buying centers and decision makers. The lack
of products from major vendors and the inconsistent usage of the CDM term impede fast adoption.
User Advice: IT should look at CDM as part of a backup modernization effort or when managing
multiple application copies for testing/development has become costly, overwhelming or a
bottleneck. CDM could also be useful for organizations that are looking for active access to
secondary data sources for reporting or analytics due to its separation from the production
environment. Enterprises should also look at opportunities for database and application archiving
for storage reduction or governance initiatives to further justify investment. Due to the short history
of the new architecture and vendors, new use cases beyond the common ones are not field-proven
and should be approached with caution.

Business Impact: IT organizations have historically used different storage and software products to
deliver backup, archive, replication, test/development, legacy application archiving and other data-
intensive services with very little control or management across these services. This results in
overinvestment in storage capacity, software licenses and operational expenditure costs associated
with managing excessive storage and software. CDM facilitates the use of one copy of data for all of
these functions via virtual copies, thereby dramatically reducing the need for multiple physical
copies of data and enabling organizations to cut costs associated with multiple disparate software
licenses and storage islands. The separation of the "golden image" from the production
environment can facilitate aggressive recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives
(RTOs). In the case of test/development, CDM improves the workflow process and operational
efficiency by enabling database administrators and application developers more self-services
capabilities.
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Actifio; Catalogic Software; Cohesity; Delphix; Rubrik
Information Dispersal Algorithms

Analysis By: Valdis Filks
Definition: Information dispersal algorithms provide a methodology for storing information in pieces
(i.e., dispersed) across multiple locations, so that redundancy protects the information in the event
of localized outages, and unauthorized data access at a single location does not provide usable
information. Only the originator or a user with a list of the latest pointers created by the original
dispersal algorithm can properly assemble the complete information.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: These algorithms are being used in more data center
storage devices to improve data availability and scale. Nevertheless, commercial solutions continue
to become available for the data center from large, established vendors and smaller startups for
domestic use and file sync and share. The solutions are also built-in and are available in home
consumer storage appliances. However, they differ from the presently prevailing centralized cloud
storage offerings as these solutions are not centralized, but distributed and, similar to the internet,
have no central control or fault domain. The Information dispersal algorithm technology has been
expanded to include peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technologies and protocols, such as those
based on the BitTorrent protocol, which has proved robust on the internet. A variation is the open-
source BitTorrent protocol used in P2P networks to store and recreate data among systems. This is
an early cloud technology in which the data is truly dispersed, rather than stored in a small number
of centralized, hyperscale or traditional data centers. Therefore, fault tolerance is provided by the
nature of the design of these systems, and, due to the dispersal nature of the data, some protection
is also provided by their design. Due to their innate design, many scale-out storage systems are
implementing redundant array of independent disks (RAID) designs that disperse data among nodes

within racks. This technology is developing into geographically distributed, file-sharing nodes,
blurring the lines between scale-out storage systems, information dispersal algorithms and cloud
storage.
User Advice: Many vendors have been using this technology in scale-out storage systems for more
than five years and it has proved to be reliable. Customers who are not satisfied with centralized
cloud storage offerings should investigate information dispersal algorithms as they reduce customer
dependence on a few large hyperscale vendors and locations that still use the traditional centralized
data center design. In many ways, these algorithms are tantamount to a form of encryption. The
design, coding and testing of the attack resistance of dispersion algorithms has proven to be a
difficult undertaking because it is of similar complexity to the design of encryption implementations.
Just as proprietary forms of encryption should not be considered as reliable as implementations
based on well-proven algorithms and code, the robustness of proprietary dispersal algorithms —
and especially their implementations — should not automatically be considered trusted code.
Buyers that expect to rely on this technology for confidentiality control should seek evidence from
the tester at high levels of testing and from peer review.
Business Impact: Information dispersal algorithms are used in the latest storage arrays, integrated
systems and SDS software. It could eventually provide secure storage over the internet and other
public or private networks without the overhead and other costs of encryption and the need to have
centralized hyperscale data centers, such as those from Amazon and Google. Use of the BitTorrent
protocol has been political because one of its early applications was to share copyrighted data via
the internet among home PCs. However, the protocol is content-neutral and simple to use. It could
just as easily be used by software companies to distribute software, updates and any digital
information that is stored and geographically dispersed among many nodes and computers in a
network.
Open-source implementations are integrated into products by commercial companies as a new

method to distribute and store digital data. This is one factor that increases the amount of
unstructured data stored on the planet.
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: BitTorrent; Caringo; Ctera Networks; EMC; Hedvig; HGST; IBM; SimpliVity; Vivint
Recommended Reading: "Traditional Storage Vendors, Brands and Products Are No Longer Risk-
Free"
"Increases in Disk Capacity Are Affecting RAID Recovery; Start to Purchase New RAID
Technologies"
Integrated Systems: Hyperconvergence

Analysis By: George J. Weiss; Andrew Butler

Definition: Hyperconverged systems are integrated systems that apply a modular and shared
compute/network/storage building block approach, with a unified management layer on commodity
hardware and direct-attached storage leveraging scale-out clusters.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Hyperconverged infrastructure is a rapidly expanding

market segment that is expected to increase at a 65% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). By
2020, hyperconverged integrated systems (HCISs) will represent 32% of total converged
infrastructure shipments by revenue, with HCIS reaching $6 billion. HCIS enables IT to start from a
small base — a single or dual node — and incrementally scale out as demand requires. The
modular-building-block approach enables enterprises to take small steps, rather than make the
significant upfront investments required by traditional integrated systems, which typically have a
costly proprietary chassis with fabric infrastructure.
Gartner expects HCISs to continue their expansion with new providers, as well as most traditional
system vendors, supporting HCIS in their portfolios. Systems will continue to evolve with additional
feature/function deliverables and broader vendor portfolios to address mixed workloads. The fast
pace of hyperconvergence growth will begin peaking in the 2020 period. However, we expect
continued feature/function evolution toward hybrid cloud configurations and higher levels of
application delivery agility and efficiency through advancements such as composable infrastructure
and cloud management functions and integration.
User Advice: IT leaders should recognize HCIS as an evolution within the broader category of
integrated systems that lays the foundation for ease of use, simplicity, virtualization, cloud
deployment and eventual bimodal implementations. IT should be able to harness its fundamental
advantages in efficiency, utilization, agility, data protection, continued life cycle deployment and
orchestration as part of a strategic data center modernization objective. Plan strategically, but invest
tactically in hyperconverged systems, because the market is nascent and subject to volatility. Plan
for a payback of two years or less to ensure financial success and investment value. Test the
scalability limits of solutions and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits, because improvements will
occur rapidly during this nascent period.
Business Impact: Although integrated systems will generally be driven by new workloads and data
center modernization initiatives, the hyperconverged portion has also experienced enthusiastic
reception from the midmarket, due to the simplicity and convenience of appliance configurations.
Use cases especially well-suited to HCIS include virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), server
virtualization and consolidation, data migration, private cloud, remote or branch office, relational
databases, Hadoop, and dedicated application infrastructures. However, general-purpose
workloads are increasingly being moved from server virtualization blades to exploit HCIS's favorable
TCO properties.

Sample Vendors: Atlantis; Cisco; Dell; EMC; Gridstore; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Nutanix;
Pivot3; Scale Computing; SimpliVity
Recommended Reading: "Prepare for the Next Phase of Hyperconvergence"
"Five Keys to Creating an Effective Hyperconvergence Strategy"
"Deploying Hyperconverged Integrated Systems: Eight Great Use Cases"
"The Positive Disruption of Hyperconvergence Adoption in the Midmarket"
"Beware the 'Myth-Conceptions' Surrounding Hyperconverged Integrated Systems"
"Competitive Landscape: Hyperconverged Integrated Systems — Multivendor Solutions"
"How to Evaluate Vendors in the Hyperconverged Space"
Infrastructure SDS
Analysis By: Julia Palmer; Dave Russell
Definition: Infrastructure software-defined storage (SDS) creates and provides data center services
to replace or augment traditional storage arrays. It can be deployed as a virtual machine, or as
software on a bare-metal x86 industry standard server, allowing organizations to deploy a storage-
as-software package. This creates a storage solution that can be accessible by file, block or object
protocols.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Infrastructure SDS is positioned to change the
economics and delivery model of enterprise storage infrastructures. Whether deployed
independently, or as an element of a hyperconverged integrated system, SDS is altering how
organizations buy and deploy enterprise storage. Following web-scale IT's lead, I&O leaders are
deploying SDS as hardware-agnostic storage, and breaking the bond from high-priced proprietary,
legacy-integrated external-controller-based (ECB) storage hardware. The power of multicore Intel
x86 processors, use of solid-state drives (SSDs) and high throughput networking have essentially
eliminated hardware-associated differentiation, transferring all of the value to storage software.
Expect new infrastructure SDS vendors and products to emerge, and to target a broad range of
delivery models and workloads, including server virtualization, archiving, big data analytics and
unstructured data. Comprehensive analyses of SDS total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits involve
both capital expenditure (capex) and operating expenditure (opex), including administrative design,
verification, deployment, and ongoing management and support, as well as a potential improvement
on business agility.
User Advice: Infrastructure SDS is the delivery of data services and storage-array-like functionality
on top of industry standard hardware. Enterprises choose a software-defined approach when they
wish to accomplish some or all of the following goals:
■ Build a storage solution at a low acquisition price point on commodity x86 platform.
■ Decouple storage software and hardware to standardize their data center platforms.

■ Establish a scalable solution specifically geared toward Mode 2 workloads.
■ Build agile, "infrastructure as code" architecture to enable storage to be a part of software-
defined data center automation and orchestration framework.
Advice to end users:
■ Recognize that infrastructure SDS remains a nascent, but growing, deployment model that will
be focused on web-scale deployment agility.
■ Implement infrastructure SDS solutions that enable you to decouple software from hardware,
reduce TCO and enable greater data mobility.
■ Assess emerging storage vendors, technologies and approaches, and create a matrix that
matches these offerings with the requirements of specific workloads.
■ Deploy infrastructure SDS for single workload or use case. Take the lessons learned from this
first deployment, and apply SDS to additional use cases.
■ For infrastructure SDS products, identify upcoming initiatives where SDS could deliver high
value. Use infrastructure SDS with commodity hardware as the basis for a new application
deployment aligned with these initiatives.
■ Build infrastructure SDS efficiency justification as a result of a proof-of-concept deployment,
based on capital expenditure ROI data and potential operating expenditure impact, as well as
better alignment with the core business requirements.
Business Impact: Infrastructure SDS is a hardware-agnostic platform. It breaks the dependency on

high-priced proprietary ECB storage hardware and lowers acquisition costs by utilizing the industry
standard x86 platform of the customer's choice. Some Gartner customers report up to 40% TCO
reduction with infrastructure SDS that comes from the use of x86 industry standard hardware and
lower cost of upgrades and maintenance fees. However, the real value of infrastructure SDS in the
long term is increased flexibility and programmability that is required for Mode 2 workloads. I&O
leaders that successfully deployed and benefited from infrastructure SDS have usually belonged to
large enterprises or cloud service providers that pursued web-scale-like efficiency, flexibility and
scalability, and viewed SDS as a critical enablement technology for their IT initiatives. I&O leaders
should look at infrastructure SDS not as another storage product but as an investment in improving
storage economics and providing data mobility including cloud integration.
Benefit Rating: Transformational
Sample Vendors: Atlantis Computing; EMC; Formation Data Systems; Hedvig; IBM; Nexenta; Red
Hat; Scality; SwiftStack; VMware

Recommended Reading: "How to Determine Whether Software-Defined Storage Is Right for Your
Organization"
"Why Hardware Matters to the Success of Your Software-Defined Storage Deployment"
"Top Five Use Cases and Benefits of Software-Defined Storage"
"I&O Leaders Can Benefit From Storage Industry Innovation"
"Innovation Insight: Separating Hype From Hope for Software-Defined Storage"
Solid-State DIMMs
Analysis By: Michele Reitz
Definition: Solid-state dual in-line memory modules (SS DIMMs) are all-flash versions of nonvolatile
DIMMs (NVDIMMs) that reside on the double data rate (DDR) DRAM memory channel and are
persistent. These devices integrate nonvolatile memory (currently NAND flash) and a system
controller chip. By sitting on the memory channel, they have key advantages over other types of
solid-state drives (SSDs) in terms of reduced write latency and increased input/output operations
per second, bandwidth and scalability.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Solid-state DIMMs were introduced in 2014, when
IBM debuted its eXFlash device (now owned by Lenovo), which is included in SanDisk's
ULLtraDIMM line of products through a partnership with Diablo Technologies. In February 2016,
Xitore introduced its NVDIMM-X product, which operates in much the same way, but boasts much
better performance and lower latency. This is due to an improved cache architecture, local high-
speed buffers and enhanced memory controller solution with flexibility to operate with a variety of
nonvolatile memory technologies on the back end.
Since DIMMs sit directly on the faster memory channel, rather than on the storage channel, they will
not face the storage channel bottlenecks of a traditional storage system. Because of this, these
NAND-flash-based SSDs can achieve drastically lower latencies (at least 50% lower) than any
existing solid-state storage solution, and can be viable alternatives to DRAM memory, if the speeds
are acceptable.
The NVDIMM Special Interest Group, a consortium within the Storage Networking Industry
Association (SNIA), classifies three types of NVDIMM — NVDIMM-N, NVDIMM-F and NVDIMM-P.
Gartner classifies NVDIMM-N and NVDIMM-P as hybrid DIMMs and NVDIMM-F as a solid-state
DIMM.
Use of any solid-state DIMMs requires a mix or all of the following: support by the host chipset,
optimization for the OS and optimization for the server hardware. As such, to achieve greater
adoption, server, driver and OS support will need to extend beyond IBM, Supermicro and Huawei
on selected platforms. In addition, use cases for memory channel products will need to spread
beyond the extremely high-performance, high-bandwidth and ultra-low-latency applications for
which they are attracting most interest today. Despite these challenges, this technology will mature

in the next two to five years as users will find the price/performance value proposition a good match
for in-memory computing, cloud, virtualization, virtual desktops, big data and analytics applications.
Evolution of 3D XPoint for SS-DIMMs will provide a higher-performance nonvolatile alternative to

NAND flash in 2017 and beyond. 3D XPoint is an emerging nonvolatile memory technology from
Intel and Micron that boasts substantial performance and reliability gains over flash memory, but it
has not been widely commercialized.
We have moved this technology profile up and over the Peak of the Hype Cycle. This is because the
initial hype that was built up with the IBM and Huawei announcements was very much affected by
the litigation levied by Netlist, thwarting Diablo's ability to amass more vendor support and achieve
larger adoption. In September 2015, the litigation case was closed and decisively ruled for Diablo,
but through this period the market has seen the peak and is gearing up for the transition through the
trough in the next two years. Lenovo announced expanded support for the original IBM product in
May 2015, and we anticipate more vendors will follow in 2016 and 2017.
User Advice: IT professionals should evaluate solid-state DIMMs for use as a new tier of storage, if
ultra-low latency is important. They should use the significant improvement in flash response times
— nearly half those of conventional SSDs — and the denser form factor to meet increased
requirements for overall system storage.
IT professionals should analyze the roadmaps of the major server and storage OEMs, along with
those of the SSD appliance vendors that will be launching DIMM-based storage systems, and weigh
the benefits for their needs. They should be aware that servers, OSs and drivers will need to be
customized to support these new types of DIMMs.
Business Impact: This technology's impact on users will be improved system performance overall.
It will also offer an alternative to DRAM for certain in-memory computing applications that need
support for large data stores and can sacrifice performance.
With DRAM prices at a premium compared with NAND flash, solid-state DIMMs will have a much-
improved price/performance ratio when it meets users' performance needs.
NAND flash vendors should consider solid-state DIMMs to enhance their value proposition for
commodity NAND flash and expand their addressable market.
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Diablo Technologies; Huawei; IBM; SanDisk; Supermicro; Xitore
Recommended Reading: "Market Trends: The Next-Generation Server-Side SSD Landscape"
"Market Share Analysis: SSDs and Solid-State Arrays, Worldwide, 2015"

Sliding Into the Trough
Integrated Backup Appliances

Analysis By: Robert Rhame
Definition: An integrated backup appliance is an all-in-one backup software and hardware solution
that combines the functions of a backup application server, media server (if applicable) and backup
target device. The appliance is typically preconfigured and fine-tuned to cater to the capabilities of
the onboard backup software. It is a more simplified and easier-to-deploy backup solution than the
traditional approach of separate software and hardware installations, but lacks flexibility on
hardware choices and scalability.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Integrated backup appliances have been around for
many years without much fanfare. The current hype is driven by existing large backup software
vendors that have started packaging their software in an appliance, and by innovative emerging
vendors that are offering all-in-one solutions. The momentum of integrated backup appliances is
driven by the desire to simplify the setup and management of the backup infrastructure, as
"complexity" is a leading challenge when it comes to backup management. Overall, integrated
backup appliances have resonated well with many small and midsize customers that are attracted
by the one-stop-shop support experience and tight integration between software and hardware. As
the appliances scale up, they will be deployed in larger environments.
Within the integrated backup appliance market, the former clear segmentation by backup repository
limitations have vanished, with most vendors adding cloud target capabilities. There are generally
three types of vendors selling integrated backup appliances separated primarily by heritage. The
first kind includes backup software vendors that package their software with hardware to offer
customers integrated appliances. Examples include Arcserve and Veritas Technologies. The second
type is made up of emerging products that tightly integrate software with hardware, such as Actifio,
Cohesity and Rubrik. The third kind is a cloud backup provider that offers a customer an on-
premises backup appliance as part of its cloud backup solution. Examples include, Barracuda
Networks, Ctera Networks, Datto and Unitrends.
User Advice: Organizations should evaluate backup software functions first to ensure that their
business requirements are met, before making a decision about acquiring an integrated backup
appliance or a software-only solution. Once a specific backup software product is chosen,
deploying an appliance with that software will simplify operational processes and address any
compatibility issues between backup software-only products and deduplication backup target
appliances. If customers prefer deploying backup software-only products to gain hardware
flexibility, they should carefully consider which back-end storage to choose — be it generic disk
array/network-attached storage (NAS) or deduplication backup target appliances.
Business Impact: Integrated backup appliances ride the current trend of converged infrastructure
and offer tight integration between software and hardware, simplify the initial purchase and
configuration process, and provide the one-vendor support experience with no finger-pointing risks.
On the down side, an integrated backup appliance tends to lack the flexibility and heterogeneous

hardware support offered by backup software-only solutions, which are often needed by large,
complex environments.
Sample Vendors: Actifio; Arcserve; Barracuda Networks; Cohesity; Ctera Networks; Datto; Rubrik;
Unitrends; Veritas Technologies
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated
Appliances"
"Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances"
Data Sanitization
Analysis By: Philip Dawson; Rob Schafer
Definition: Data sanitization is the consistently applied, disciplined process of reliably and
completely removing all data from a read/write medium so that it can no longer be read or
recovered.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Growing concerns about data privacy and security,
leakage, regulatory compliance, and the ever-expanding capacity of storage media are making
robust data sanitization a core competency for all IT organizations.
This competency should be applied to all devices with storage components (such as PCs, mobile
phones, tablets, and high-end printers and copiers) when they are repurposed, returned to the
supplier/lessor, sold, donated to charity or otherwise disposed of. Where organizations lack this
robust data sanitization competency, it is often due to handling the various stages of the asset life
cycle as isolated events, with little coordination between business boundaries (such as finance,
security, procurement and IT). Thus, the personnel assigned to IT asset disposition (ITAD) are often
different from those responsible for risk management and compliance, which can put the
organization at risk of both internal and external noncompliance.
For mobile devices, a remote data-wiping capability is commonly implemented, triggered either by
the user logging into a website or an administrator remotely invoking a mobile device manager
(MDM). Although a remote capability such as this should not be considered a fail-safe mechanism,
reliability should be adequate for a significant majority of lost or stolen mobile devices. The degree
to which various hardware storage technologies are reliably wiped varies according to organization
type and device type.
User Advice:

■ Follow a life cycle process approach to IT risk management that includes making an explicit
decision about data sanitization and destruction, device reuse and retirement, and data
archiving.
■ Implement policies that assign responsibility for all media carrying sensitive or regulated data —
whether corporate or personal — to ensure that they are properly wiped or destroyed at the end
of their production use.
■ Create appropriate data sanitization/destruction standards that provide specific guidance on the
destruction process, based on data sensitivity.
■ Verify that your ITAD vendor consistently meets your data sanitization security specifications
and standards.
■ Understand the implications of personal devices and plug-and-play storage. Organizations that
have yet to address CDs/DVDs and other portable data-bearing devices are even less prepared
to deal with these implications.
■ Consider using whole-volume encryption for portable devices and laptops, and self-encrypting
devices in the data center.
■ Consider destroying storage devices containing highly sensitive and/or regulated data (e.g.,
organizations in the financial and healthcare industries), either by mechanical means or by using
degaussing machines, rendering them permanently unusable and ensuring that the data is not
recoverable.
■ Consider software tape shredding. Tape shredding performs a three-pass wipe of the selected
virtual tapes using an algorithm specified by the U.S. Department of Defense (Standard
5220.22-M), which helps IT managers meet security and regulatory compliance requirements.
■ Forbid the use of USB memory sticks for sensitive, unencrypted files. Some undeleted but
largely inaccessible data remains on most USB memory sticks.
■ Understand end-of-contract implications, and ask current and potential providers for an
explanation of their storage reuse and account retirement practices. This advice applies to
buyers of any form of externally provisioned service.
Business Impact: At a relatively low cost, the proper use of encryption, wiping and, when
necessary, destruction will help minimize the risk that proprietary and regulated data will leak.
By limiting data sanitization to encryption and/or software wiping, organizations can preserve the
asset's residual market value; the destruction of data-bearing devices within an IT asset typically
reduces the asset's residual value (RV) to salvage, incurring the cost of environmentally compliant
recycling.
The National Association for Information Destruction (NAID) supports best practices in data
destruction services, and offers a list of service providers. Also refer to the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) December 2014 revision of its Special Publication 800-88:
"Guidelines for Media Sanitization."

Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Blancco Technology Group; DestructData; ITRenew; Kroll Ontrack
Object Storage
Definition: Object storage refers to devices and software that house data in structures called
"objects," and serve hosts via protocols (such as HTTP) and APIs (such as Amazon Simple Storage
Service [Amazon S3], OpenStack Swift and CDMI). Conceptually, objects are similar to files in that
they are composed of content and metadata. In general, objects support richer metadata than file
storage by enabling users or applications to assign attributes to objects that can be used for
administrative purposes, data mining and information management
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Although object storage products have been around
for more than a decade, the first-generation products had limitations around scalability,
performance and induced lock-in through proprietary interfaces. Broad adoption of second-
generation commercial object storage has remained low so far; however, it is now accelerating due
to the need for cost-effective big data storage. The growing maturity of solutions from emerging
vendors and refreshed products from large storage portfolio vendors is expected to further stimulate
adoption from end users, as the addressable use cases for these products increase. While cost
containment of traditional SAN/NAS infrastructure continues to be the key driver for object storage
adoption, private cloud and analytics deployments in big data industries such as media and
entertainment, life sciences, the public sector, and education/research are spawning new
investments. Object storage products are available in a variety of deployment models — virtual
appliances, managed hosting, purpose-built hardware appliances or software that can be
consumed in a flexible manner.
User Advice: IT leaders that require highly scalable, self-healing and cost-effective storage
platforms for unstructured data should evaluate the suitability of object storage products. The
common use cases that Gartner sees for object storage are archiving, backup, cloud storage and
content distribution. When building on-premises object storage repositories, customers should
evaluate the product's API support for dominant public cloud providers, so that they can extend
their workloads to a public cloud, if needed. Amazon's S3 has emerged as the dominant API, with
more vendors starting to support OpenStack Swift API as well. Select object storage vendors that
offer a wide choice of deployment (software-only versus packaged appliances versus managed
hosting) and licensing models (perpetual versus subscription) that can provide flexibility and reduce
TCO. These products are capable of a huge scale in capacity and better-suited for workloads that
require high bandwidth than transactional workloads that demand high input/output operations per
second (IOPS) and low latency.
Business Impact: Rapid growth in unstructured data (40% year over year) and the need to store
and retrieve it in a cost-effective, automated manner will drive the growth of object storage. Object

storage can be effective in big data environments, which scale from a few hundred terabytes to tens
of petabytes. Because objects exist as self-describing logical entities, coupled with metadata and
controlled by policies, they can scale effectively. Object storage is also well-suited to multitenant
environments that need stringent object-level security and rich metadata for easy automation and
management. There is growing interest in object storage from enterprise developers and DevOps
team members looking for agile and programmable infrastructures that can be extended to the
public cloud. Object storage software, deployed on commodity hardware, is emerging as a threat to
external controller-based (ECB) storage hardware vendors in big data environments with heavy
volume challenges.
Sample Vendors: Caringo; Cloudian; DataDirect Networks; EMC; Hitachi Data Systems; IBM;
NetApp; Red Hat; Scality; SwiftStack
Recommended Reading: "Critical Capabilities for Object Storage"
"Choosing the Right Storage for Cloud-Native Applications"
"Market Guide for Open-Source Storage"
Storage Cluster File Systems

Definition: Distributed file systems 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 handle
availability and data protection in a self-healing manner and to provide high throughput and scalable
capacity in a linear manner.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The growing strategic importance of storing and
analyzing large-scale, unstructured data is bringing scale-out storage architectures to the forefront
of IT infrastructure planning. Storage vendors are continuing to develop cluster file systems to
address performance and scalability limitations in traditional, scale-up, network-attached storage
(NAS) environments. This makes them suitable for batch and interactive processing and other high-
bandwidth workloads. Apart from academic high-performance computing (HPC) environments,
commercial vertical industries — such as oil and gas, financial services, media and entertainment,
life sciences, research and web services — are leading adopters for applications that require highly
scalable storage bandwidth.
Beyond the HPC use case, large home directories storage, rich-media streaming, backup and
archiving are other common use cases for cluster file systems. Products from vendors such as
Panasas, DataDirect Networks (DDN) and Intel are most common in HPC environments. Most

leading storage vendors, such as Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and IBM, as well as
emerging vendors, such as Red Hat and Qumulo, have enhanced their presence in this segment.
Vendors are also increasingly starting to offer software-based deployment options in a capacity-
based perpetual licensing model to stimulate market adoption.
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is starting to see wide enterprise adoption for big data,
batch processing use cases and beyond. With the growing demand for high input/output operations
per second (IOPS) and aggregated bandwidth for shared storage, cluster file systems are expected
to see robust adoption in the future.
User Advice: Storage cluster file systems have been around for years, although vendor maturity
varies widely. Users that need products that enable them to pay as they grow in a highly dynamic
environment, or that need high bandwidth for shared storage, should put cluster file systems on
their shortlists. Most commercial and open-source products specialize in tackling specific use cases
but integration with workflows may be lacking in several products. Evaluate your application and
input/output (I/O) requirements to select a pertinent cluster file system. Prioritize scalability,
performance manageability, independent software vendor (ISV) support, deployment flexibility and
resiliency features as important selection criteria. There is little technical know-how regarding scale-
out file systems in many enterprise IT organizations; hence, I&O leaders should allocate a portion of
the storage budget to training.
Business Impact: Storage cluster file systems are competitive alternatives that scale storage
bandwidth more linearly, surpassing expensive monolithic frame storage arrays in this capability.
The business impact of storage cluster file systems is most pronounced in environments in which
applications generate large amounts of unstructured data, and the primary access is through file
protocols. However, they will also have an increasing impact on traditional data centers that want to
overcome the limitations of dual-controller storage designs as well as for use cases such as backup
and archiving. Many storage cluster file systems will have a significant impact on private cloud
services, which require a highly scalable and elastic infrastructure. IT professionals keen to
consolidate file server or NAS file sprawl should consider using cluster file system storage products
that offer operational simplicity and nearly linear scalability.
Sample Vendors: Cray; Dell; HP; Huawei; IBM; Intel; Panasas; Quantum; Qumulo; Red Hat
Recommended Reading: "Critical Capabilities for Scale-Out File System Storage"
"Who's Who in Open-Source, Scale-Out File System Storage"
Cross-Platform Structured Data Archiving

Analysis By: Garth Landers

Definition: Cross-platform structured data archiving software moves data from custom or
commercially provided applications to an alternate file system or DBMS while maintaining data
access and referential integrity. Reducing the volume of data in production instances can improve
performance; shrink batch windows; and reduce storage acquisition costs, facility requirements, the
cost of preserving data for compliance when retiring applications and environmental footprints.
Archives can also be used for historical and other analysis.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Structured data archiving tools have been available
for almost two decades and have historically seen more adoption in larger enterprises. These
products provide functionality to identify old or infrequently used application data and manage it
appropriately. Although ROI can be high, developing policies for retaining and deleting old
application data is difficult and often not seen as a priority. In addition, vendor offerings are
expensive, and enterprises will only engage when events demand it. Organizations generally tend to
add more database licenses or use native database capabilities, such as purging and partitioning, to
address application growth. The technology has long been seen as a cost avoidance measure used
to contain operational and capital expenditures related to data growth as well as improve factors
like application performance. The market is changing and growing due to growth in data,
application retirement, information governance requirements and big data analysis opportunities.
Today's data archiving products are mature and will face challenges as various distributions of
Hadoop add capabilities such as retention management. Increasingly, leading vendors are looking
to support Hadoop and differentiate through vertical offerings, such as healthcare. In addition, new
approaches to application retirement and curbing structured data growth are happening through
areas such as copy data management. This approach, while immature when applied to these use
cases, is growing, and offers a less complex approach than the technology offered by leading
offerings. Application retirement continues to be a significant driver. Organizations are looking for
ways to cut costs associated with maintaining no-longer-needed legacy applications while
preserving application data for compliance or its historical value. Data center consolidations,
moving to the cloud, and mergers and acquisitions are contributing to the interest in structured data
archiving solutions to reduce the number of enterprise applications.
Competition often comes from internal resources who want to build it themselves and from
improvements in storage technology that transparently improve performance while reducing storage
acquisition and ownership costs — more specifically, autotiering, SSDs, data compression and data
deduplication. Do-it-yourself efforts typically lack appropriate governance controls such as secure
access, data masking and retention management, and legal hold. The allure of tools that can
support multiple applications and underlying databases and the added capabilities these tools
provide for viewing data as business objects independent of the application are driving
administrators to consider them as viable solutions. New capabilities — such as better search and
reporting, integration with big data analysis tools, retention management, support for database
partitioning, and support for SAP archiving — are broadening their appeal. Also, newer product
offerings are beginning to include unstructured data along with relational data for a more holistic
approach to application archiving.
User Advice: The ROI for implementing a structured data archiving solution can be exceptionally
high, especially to retire an application or to deploy a packaged application for which vendor-
supplied templates are available to ease implementation and maintenance. Expect that the planning

phase may take longer than the implementation. Among the roadblocks to implementation are
requiring the consulting services, gaining application owner acceptance (especially through testing
access to archived data), defining the archiving policies and building the initial business case.
Application retirement projects with large data footprints and numerous applications are projects
that can span more than a year. Most vendors in this space can provide good references, and
organizations should speak with references that have similar application portfolios and goals for
managing their data. Enterprises should consider developing their own solutions when either the
number of applications being retired is very low, data retention requirements are not very long (such
as one to two years) or governance requirements such as audit or litigation are unlikely.
Business Impact: Creating an archive of less frequently accessed data and reducing the size of the
active application database (and all related copies of that database) improve application
performance and recoverability, and lower costs related to database and application license, server,
infrastructure and operation costs. Transferring old, rarely accessed data from a disk archive to tape
can further reduce storage requirements. Most vendors in this space are supporting cloud storage
as the repository for archived data. Retiring or consolidating legacy applications cuts the costs and
risks associated with maintaining these systems. Optimally, historical data can be preserved for
analysis, supporting improvements to digital business. Overall, organizations can experience better
information governance, including reduced risk associated with governance events like audits.
Maturity: Mature mainstream
Sample Vendors: Delphix; HP; IBM; Informatica; OpenText; PBS; Solix Technologies
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application
Retirement"
"Use Hadoop for Your Big Data Archiving"
"Build a Leaner Data Center Through Application Retirement"
"Storage and Data Management Are Not the Same Thing"
Emerging Data Storage Protection Schemes

Analysis By: Stanley Zaffos
Definition: Emerging data storage protection schemes deliver higher mean time between data loss
(MTBDL) than traditional redundant array of independent disks (RAID) schemes. Commercial
implementations of emerging data storage protection schemes include replacing the concept of
spare disks with spare capacity, which enables parallel rather than sequential data rebuilds; rebuilds
that only reconstruct data actually stored on failed disks or nodes; triple mirroring; Reed Solomon, a
form or erasure coding; other erasure codes; and dispersal algorithms.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Hard-disk drive (HDD) capacity is growing faster than
HDD data rates. The result is ever longer rebuild times that are outstripping traditional RAID
implementations' ability to effectively protect data against HDD failures; hence, the focus on
reducing rebuild times or increasing the fault tolerance or resiliency of the data protection scheme.
Erasure coding and dispersal algorithms, which add the physical separation of storage nodes to
erasure coding, take advantage of inexpensive compute power to store blocks of data as systems
of equations, and transform these systems of equations back into blocks of data during read
operations. Allowing the user to specify the number of failures that can be tolerated during a data
rebuild within an HDD or solid-state drive (SSD) group enables users to trade off data protection
overheads (costs) against MTBDLs. Because erasure coding and dispersal algorithms increase the
number of overhead inputs/outputs (I/Os) needed to protect data, they are most commonly used in
scale-out storage systems supporting applications that are not response-time-sensitive.
User Advice: Require vendors offering advanced data protection schemes to profile the
performance/throughput of their storage systems supporting your workloads using the various
protection schemes supported to better understand performance-overhead trade-offs. Request
minimum/average/maximum rebuild times to size the likely rebuild window of vulnerability in a
storage system supporting your production workloads. Cap microprocessor consumption at 75% of
available cycles to ensure that the system's ability to meet service-level objectives is not
compromised during rebuilds. Give extra credit to vendors willing to guarantee rebuild times.
Confirm that the choice of protection scheme does not limit the use of other value-added features,
such as compression and deduplication, autotiering, or deduplication.
Business Impact: The deployment of advanced protection schemes will enable vendors and users
to continue lowering storage costs by taking advantage of disk capacity increases as soon as they
become technically and economically attractive. The rapid adoption of new high-capacity HDDs will
reduce environmental footprints, and may enable users to delay or avoid doing facilities upgrades or
expansions.
Sample Vendors: Caringo; DataDirect Networks (DDN); Dell; EMC; IBM; NEC; Panasas; Scality;
SwiftStack
Recommended Reading: "Increases in Disk Capacity Are Affecting RAID Recovery; Start to
Purchase New RAID Technologies"
"Technology Overview for Erasure Coding"
"Slow Storage Replication Requires the Redesign of Disaster Recovery Infrastructures"
Enterprise Endpoint Backup

Analysis By: Pushan Rinnen

Definition: Enterprise endpoint backup refers to backup products for laptops, desktops, tablets and
smartphones that can recover corrupted or lost data residing on the devices, as well as personal
configurations. Endpoint backup differs from file sync and share's versioning capabilities in that
backup preserves secure, centrally managed copies that cannot be changed or deleted by end
users and that it protects PC/laptop data in a more comprehensive way. However, mobile content
protection is weaker due to lack of APIs from mobile OS providers.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Overall, more organizations are adopting endpoint
backup to tackle different risks. Those that have globally distributed offices and employees like to
leverage web-scale public cloud storage providers and backup-as-a-service providers that offer a
multiple-country presence. As employees become more mobile, laptop backup has been the driving
force for organizations to adopt endpoint backup, not just to restore lost data, but also to enable
more efficient ways to perform ongoing laptop refresh/migration, to comply with company policies,
to perform legal hold and e-discovery, and to avoid other risks such as potential data leaks or
ransomware attacks. Technologywise, vendors have added more features to cater to the mobile
nature of laptops, such as VPN-less backup over the internet, cellular network awareness and
remote wipe. Other new product developments focus on legal hold capabilities, device
replacement/migration automation and full-text search for faster restore/recovery. The old
performance issues are tackled by the use of client-side deduplication in addition to incremental
forever backups, near-continuous data protection (CDP) technologies, and CPU and network
throttling.
Backup of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones continues to be problematic due to lack
of APIs for integration with third-party backup software. As a result, most organizations don't have a
policy regarding mobile data backup.
User Advice: Protecting endpoint user data must be part of a robust enterprise data protection and
recovery plan. Organizations should evaluate and deploy a laptop/PC backup solution, be it on-
premises or in the cloud, to maintain control and prevent data loss or leakage, instead of depending
on employees to create their own backup methods.
Business Impact: Endpoint backup and recovery have become increasingly important as the global
workforce has become more mobile and is creating more business content on their various
endpoint devices. Moreover, new malicious attacks such as ransomware have increased risk
profiles and may rely on backup to restore data instead of paying the ransom. If employees don't
back up their endpoint devices regularly (and many do not on their own), companies may face
significant risks when important or sensitive data is lost, stolen or leaked, including R&D setbacks,
fines, legal actions and the inability to produce user data in a lawsuit. Based on Gartner's estimates,
laptop/PC data loss as a result of lack of backup could cost an organization of 10,000 employees
about $1.8 million a year.

Sample Vendors: Asigra; Code42; Commvault; Ctera Networks; Datacastle; Druva; EMC; HP;
Infrascale; Intermedia
Recommended Reading: "Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Endpoint Backup"
"How to Address Three Key Challenges When Considering Endpoint Backup"
"Cloud File Sync/Share Is Not Backup"
Hybrid DIMMs
Analysis By: Michele Reitz
Definition: Hybrid dual in-line memory modules (hybrid DIMMs) are nonvolatile DIMMs that reside
on the double data rate (DDR) DRAM memory channel, function as DRAM memory and focus on
preserving data in case of power failure in critical applications. They integrate DRAM and nonvolatile
memory (currently NAND flash), a system controller chip and an ultracapacitor powerful enough to
allow the module time to write all of the contents of the DRAM to the nonvolatile memory when
power is lost unexpectedly, thereby providing persistent data storage.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Hybrid DIMMs are good alternatives to battery-
powered backup systems or the super-capacitor-based DIMMs used to save current data in case of
power failure. Hybrid DIMMs use the same industry-standard DRAM sockets, and — with declines
in NAND flash pricing — it is becoming economical to design systems with sufficient storage
capacity to enable backup capability. Generally, there is a one-to-two ratio between DRAM and
NAND storage capacity, but that can change according to the application. Hybrid DIMMs also can
be configured for use as secondary storage, as long as they possess flash management and
interface support for the host application.
The NVDIMM Special Interest Group, a consortium within the Storage Networking Industry
Association (SNIA), classifies three types of NVDIMM — NVDIMM-N, NVDIMM-F and NVDIMM-P.
Gartner classifies NVDIMM-N and NVDIMM-P as hybrid DIMMs and NVDIMM-F as a solid-state
DIMM.
Industry support and standardization are critical for adoption. Currently, only a few major OEMs are
using the technology. In addition, hybrid DIMMs are available from only two major DRAM and NAND
vendors — Micron (via AgigA Tech and Hewlett Packard Enterprise) and SK hynix — and from
custom module providers such as Viking Technology, Smart Modular and a few other small module
vendors. We expect other major memory vendors to enter the market, along with other custom
module providers that are already involved in both DRAM and flash-based memory modules. We
expect adoption of this technology to increase slowly in the next two to three years.
In addition, evolution of 3D XPoint for P type NVDIMMs will provide a higher-performance

nonvolatile alternative to NAND flash in 2017 and beyond. 3D XPoint is an emerging nonvolatile
memory technology from Intel and Micron that boasts substantial performance and reliability gains
over flash memory, but it has not been widely commercialized.

The slow pace of new introductions of hybrid DIMMs, slow growth of OEM support, slow migration
of users to new technologies and a lack of education about the potential benefits of hybrid DIMMs
has limited penetration of this technology. We have, therefore, moved its position down slightly
closer to the Trough of Disillusionment on the Hype Cycle compared with last year.
User Advice: IT professionals should examine the roadmaps of major server and storage OEMs, as
well as those of solid-state array (SSA) vendors, to see which will launch hybrid DIMM-based
systems. They should ascertain whether hybrid DIMMs are supported by the OS and server they
wish to use, and whether the required BIOS changes have been implemented in their target
systems. The latencies of hybrid DIMMs and all DRAM DIMMs require that servers, systems and OS
timing routines are tuned properly.
IT professionals should educate themselves about the option to use hybrid DIMMs to meet their
nonvolatile DIMM needs. Although the focus of hybrid DIMMs is DRAM backup, they also can be
used as a new tier of storage with access times closer to DRAM, as they are significantly faster than
conventional SSDs and have a denser form factor that allows for greater system capacities. For this
use case, users should consider both hybrid and solid-state DIMMs.
Business Impact: Hybrid DIMMs have several advantages over conventional battery-powered
backup DIMMs, including faster speed, lower maintenance costs, greater reliability, high availability
and improved system performance. Currently, the cost premium over existing solutions is
considerable, but it should drop as NAND flash pricing stabilizes and competition intensifies
throughout the remainder of 2016 and into 2017.
Memory vendors should consider hybrid DIMMs as a way of adding value to what are essentially
two commodity products — DRAM and NAND flash (or, potentially, 3D XPoint). By exploiting the
attributes of these devices, they will not only enhance their own value proposition, but also expand
their addressable market.
Sample Vendors: AgigA Tech; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Intel; Micron Technology; Netlist;
Samsung; SK hynix; Smart Modular; Viking Technology
Recommended Reading: "Market Trends: The Next-Generation Server-Side SSD Landscape"
Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery

Analysis By: Pushan Rinnen; Dave Russell

Definition: Virtual machine (VM) backup and recovery focuses on protecting and recovering data
from VMs, as opposed to the physical server they run on. Backup methods optimized for VM
backup typically leverage hypervisor-native APIs for changed block tracking (CBT), which enables
block-level incremental forever backup, eliminating the general need for the in-guest agent backup
method. Some backup vendors created their own CBT driver before a hypervisor vendor introduced
its own.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Enterprise VM backup typically focuses on VMware
and Hyper-V, as they are the most deployed hypervisors in enterprise data centers. For VMware
backup, most backup software solutions have abandoned the traditional guest OS agent approach
and adopted image-based backup, leveraging VMware's CBT and data protection APIs. However,
many traditional backup applications require installation of guest OS agents to do granular item
restore for applications, such as Exchange and SharePoint running on VMware. Other differentiators
center around ease of use, scalability and self-service capabilities. For Microsoft Hyper-V, some
vendors developed their own Hyper-V CBT driver, but we expect the native CBT driver in the
upcoming Windows Server 2016 later this year to become the standard. While both VMware and
Microsoft have native backup tools for small homogeneous VM environments, Veeam continues to
be the leading vendor for heterogeneous, VM-focused backup. Meanwhile, a few smaller vendors
are competing on prices for service providers or small businesses. Integrated VMware backup
appliances, such as Rubrik and Cohesity, have also emerged, offering an easier path to scale
backup hardware infrastructure. VM backup tends to have a socket-based pricing model instead of
a capacity-based model.
Agentless backup for other VM platforms is spotty at best. Backup for containers such as Docker
hasn't become a user requirement, as most deployment of containers is for test/development and
workloads that don't require persistent storage and data recovery. The sample vendor list includes
the vendors that have products that only or primarily back up VMs.
User Advice: Recoverability of the virtual infrastructure is a significant component of an

organization's overall data availability, backup/recovery and disaster recovery plan. Protection of
VMs needs to be taken into account during the planning stage of a server virtualization deployment,
as virtualization presents new challenges and new options for data protection.
Evaluate application data protection and restoration requirements before choosing VM-level
backup. Additionally, snapshot, replication and data reduction techniques, and deeper integration
with the hypervisor provider, should also be viewed as important capabilities. With hundreds to
thousands of VMs deployed in the enterprise, and typically with 10 or more mission-critical VMs on
a physical server, improved data capture, bandwidth utilization, and monitoring and reporting
capabilities will be required to provide improved protection without complex scripting and
administrative overhead.
Business Impact: As production environments have become highly or completely virtualized, the
need to protect data in these environments has become critical. VM backup and recovery solutions
help recover from the impact of disruptive events, including user or administrator errors, application
errors, external or malicious attacks, equipment malfunction, and the aftermath of disaster events.
The ability to protect and recover VMs in an automated, repeatable and timely manner is important
for many organizations.

Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience
Sample Vendors: Cohesity; Dell; Hewlett Packard Enterrpise; Rubrik; Veeam Software; Vembu;
Zerto
Recommended Reading: "Essential Practices for Optimizing VMware Backup"
"Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software"
"Critical Capabilities for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software"
"Best Practices for Repairing the Broken State of Backup"

Analysis By: Raj Bala
Definition: Cloud storage gateways refer to the physical or virtual appliances that reside in an
organization's enterprise data center and/or public cloud network. They provide users and
applications with seamless access to files stored in a public or private cloud. Users and applications
typically read and write files through network file system or host connection protocols. Files are then
transparently written to remote cloud storage through web service protocols, such as those offered
by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Cloud storage gateways are important elements of
hybrid cloud storage models that connect on-premises storage with public cloud storage services
from vendors such as AWS, Google and Microsoft. The market for cloud storage gateways is mostly
made up of startup companies or large vendors that have acquired startup companies. The
acquired products have been folded into larger product portfolios and, in some cases, are bundled
together with products as diverse as high-end storage arrays, enterprise backup software and
public cloud services. Customers typically deploy cloud storage gateways for archiving and
collaboration use cases that traditional storage platforms do not support, but primary cloud storage
gateway functionality is being introduced into object storage platforms such as IBM Cleversafe and
Scality. Some cloud storage gateways, such as those from Nasuni and Panzura, provide a global
namespace for files across disparate offices, but with local file access performance.
User Advice: The market for cloud storage gateways is much smaller compared with other
adjacent, emerging storage markets. Businesses are not adopting cloud storage gateways or
exhibiting hybrid cloud storage behavior in large numbers.
Users should deploy cloud storage gateways to realize unique value that isn't present in products
from more mature markets such as HCIS. In particular, no other categories of storage products
provide a global namespace, file locking and mobile access. These features serve collaboration and

file sharing use cases across disparate geographies that are otherwise underserved by the larger
storage market.
Business Impact: Cloud storage gateways act as a technology bridge between on-premises
storage and public cloud storage. But technology bridges are often temporary. They are eventually
dismantled when users understand how to get to the other side. And that case is already happening
in the market for cloud storage gateways. Businesses are either keeping applications and data on-
premises, or they are moving them to public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Only
infrequently are they taking a hybrid approach unless unique value can be derived.
Cloud storage gateways can provide customers that want to reduce in-house backup/disaster
recovery processes, archives and unstructured data with compelling, cloud-based alternatives.
Some organizations are deploying cloud storage gateways such as virtual appliances in compute
instances running in public cloud IaaS providers, such as AWS and Google Cloud Platform. The
gateways then connect back to a customer's enterprise data center and act as a bridge between
elastically scaled compute instances in the public cloud and the data stored on primary storage
platforms inside the customer's data center. This scenario is particularly useful for big data
workloads where the compute capacity is best used in a temporary, elastic fashion. This model flips
the traditional notion of an enterprise's use of public cloud: An enterprise data center becomes an
extension of public cloud, rather than the opposite.
Sample Vendors: Amazon Web Services; Avere Systems; Ctera Networks; EMC; Microsoft; Nasuni;
NetApp; Panzura
Recommended Reading: "Market Guide for Cloud Storage Gateways"
Disaster Recovery as a Service

Analysis By: John P Morency
Definition: Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a cloud-based recovery service in which the
service provider is responsible for managing virtual machine (VM) replication, VM activation and
exercise management. Increasingly, in addition to service offerings that just recover virtual
machines, a growing number of service providers are now offering managed hosting services for
hybrid recovery configurations that are composed of both physical and virtual servers.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Over the past year, Gartner has seen a significant
increase in both the number of DRaaS providers (more than 250 today) and in the number of
production service instances (over 50,000, more than double the number in 2015). Initially, small
organizations with fewer than 100 employees were DRaaS early adopters. The reason for the
service uptake in smaller organizations was because they often lacked the recovery data center,
experienced IT staff and specialized skill sets needed to manage a disaster recovery (DR) program

on their own. This made managed recovery in the cloud an extremely attractive option. However,
since the beginning of 2014, many large (1,000 to 5,000 employees) and very large (5,000-plus
employees) enterprises have also begun initial piloting or have moved beyond the piloting stage to
full production. Today, large and very large enterprises represent approximately 27% and 13% of
the DRaaS installed base, respectively.
Because of the growing number of production instances, rapidly falling service pricing and
significant increases in service pilot evaluations, Gartner has increased the Hype Cycle position of
DRaaS to post-trough 10%.
User Advice: Clients should not assume that the use of cloud-based recovery services will
subsume the use of traditional DR providers or self-managed DR any time in the near future. The
key reasons for this are computing-platform-specific recovery requirements, security concerns,
active-active operations requirements and cost advantages of noncloud alternatives, among others.
Therefore, it is important to look at DRaaS as just one possible alternative for addressing in-house
recovery and continuity requirements.
Consider cloud infrastructure when you need DR capabilities for either Windows- or Linux-centric
cloud-based applications, or when the alternative to a cloud-based recovery approach is the
acquisition of additional servers and storage equipment for building out a dedicated recovery site.
Additionally, because cloud services for enterprises are still rapidly evolving, carefully weigh the cost
benefits against the service management risks as an integral part of your DR sourcing decision
making.
Business Impact: The business impact is moderate today. The actual benefits will vary, depending
on the diversity of computing platforms that require recovery support and the extent to which
service customers can orchestrate (and ideally fully automate) the recurring recovery testing tasks
that need to be performed. An additional consideration is the extent to which the customer can
transparently and efficiently use same-provider cloud storage for ongoing data backup, replication
and archival. The key challenge is ensuring that these services can be securely, reliably and
economically used to complement or supplant the use of more traditional equipment subscription-
based services or the use of dedicated facilities. In addition, given that no service, including DRaaS,
is immune to scope creep, it is incumbent on service users to ensure that providers consistently
deliver on committed recovery time and availability service levels, especially as the size of the in-
scope configuration increases and the configuration itself becomes more heterogeneous.
Sample Vendors: Axcient; Bluelock; Cable & Wireless Worldwide; iland; IBM Resiliency Services;
Microsoft (Azure); NTT Communications; Sungard Availability Services; Verizon Enterprise Solutions;
VMware
Recommended Reading: "Five Pragmatic Questions to Ask Potential DRaaS Providers"

"10 Strategic Questions to Ask Potential DRaaS Providers"
"Critical Capabilities for Disaster Recovery as a Service"
"Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service"
Public Cloud Storage

Analysis By: Raj Bala
Definition: Public cloud storage is infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that provides block, file and/or
object storage services delivered through various protocols. The services are stand-alone but often
used in conjunction with compute and other IaaS products. The services are priced based on
capacity, data transfer and/or number of requests. The services provide on-demand storage and are
self-provisioned. Stored data exists in a multitenant environment, and users access that data
through the block, network and REST protocols provided by the services.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Public cloud storage forms a primitive in the building
blocks of IaaS platforms, with providers offering a wide range of storage services. Storage services
are optimized for workloads by performance, cost and availability. Public cloud storage usage is
largely driven by workloads in IaaS compute instances. Enterprise customers occasionally use
hybrid solutions that bridge on-premises or colocated storage with public cloud services. This
allows for seamless operation between disparate environments.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are solidifying their positions in the market and are
continuing to establish their global presence and credibility. However, regulatory and sovereignty
concerns have contributed to differences in expectations among users in the U.S. and other
geographic areas. Gartner expects adoption expansion to continue as costs, legal concerns,
security and infrastructure integration issues are sufficiently addressed to reduce the risk of usage
by large enterprises.
User Advice: Utilize public cloud storage services when deploying applications in public cloud IaaS
environments. Match workload characteristics and cost requirements to a provider with equivalently
suited services. The realistic possibility of upheaval in this market warrants significant consideration
of the risks should organizations choose a provider that is not one of the hyperscale vendors such
as AWS, Google and Microsoft. Many of the Tier 2 public cloud storage providers that exist today
may not exist in the same form tomorrow, if they exist at all.
Business Impact: The cost and agility expectations set by IaaS providers are enabling in-house IT
operations to change their storage infrastructure management procedures and storage
infrastructure strategies. User demands for lower costs, more agility and operations that are more
autonomic are influencing vendor R&D investments and cloud service offerings.
Vendors continue to introduce a wide range of storage services with varying performance and cost
— most notably archive tiers of storage for infrequently accessed data. Vendors are enabling end
users to align their storage costs with their usage rates and reduce costs as a result.

Operational management of hardware and underlying infrastructure shifts to the cloud provider, but
management issues such as chargeback, billing, security and performance responsibilities remain
with the customer.
Sample Vendors: Alibaba Cloud; Amazon Web Services; AT&T; Google; IBM; Microsoft; Oracle;
Rackspace
Recommended Reading: "Market Guide for Cloud Storage Gateways"
"Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services, Worldwide"
"Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide"
Online Data Compression

Analysis By: Santhosh Rao
Definition: Online data compression encodes data using mathematical algorithms to reduce the
number of bits needed to store an object and decodes the data when it is retrieved. This analysis
deals with "lossless" compression schemes, meaning that the original data can be reconstructed in
its entirety, exactly as it was, from the compressed data with no degradation. Run-length encoding,
Lempel-Ziv and Huffman coding are three of the most popular algorithms in widespread use —
sometimes with several of these techniques used in combination.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Since the early 2000s, compression has been used in
backup appliances such as virtual tape libraries and deduplication devices. These use cases often
could tolerate the process and/or elapsed time demands that compression required.
In the last few years, compression has entered the primary storage market, and is often included in
hybrid and solid-state arrays, but older storage arrays can be years behind. Advancements in
processor speed, overall cost improvements and especially the random access, nonmechanical
nature of flash technology have accelerated compression usage for primary data.
User Advice: Online data compression offers favorable capacity savings with modest to no
performance considerations (to compress data at the time of the write and to reinflate data during a
read operation) for the majority of workloads, and should be evaluated whenever available. The
ability to apply online data compression to a greater number of use cases and workloads is
increasing as the cost per-CPU cycle declines and storage systems deploy more powerful
processors and/or additional amounts of memory, both of which can accelerate the mathematical
computations involved with compression algorithms. Compression significantly reduces writes in
solid-state arrays (SSAs), but the ability to selectively turn compression on or off in SSAs is

advantageous for workloads that are not compressible or for applications, such as Oracle
Database, that already have compression as an add-on feature.
Despite the advantages that compression can offer, data reduction is not always achievable. Data
that is previously encrypted or compressed may not exhibit any repeating patterns that
compression algorithms can further reduce, thus minimizing or negating any benefit. Also, certain
applications such as VDI and email are better suited for deduplication than compression. Today,
there is little harm caused by attempting to compress most workloads, as the processor or memory
used for compression algorithms no longer requires the same percentage of resources compared to
systems in the past.
Business Impact: Depending on performance considerations, type of data and retention periods,
compression ratios can vary; however, typical results are usually in the 2-to-1 to 4-to-1 range,
although Gartner generally guides clients to assume no higher than 2.5-to 1-for planning purposes.
The positive impact of high data compression ratios on the need for additional storage purchases,
operations, facility requirements and environmental costs will change the design of primary storage
infrastructures, as well as backup/restore and archiving solutions. SSAs are able to use online data
compression, which results in achieving price points close to traditional storage systems.
Online data compression can actually improve performance. This is because with compression
enabled, each input/output (I/O) operation could carry a higher effective data payload, thus
swapping hard disk I/O for processing cycles, an advantageous trade-off in cost and time.
Sample Vendors: EMC; Hitachi Data Systems; IBM; Kaminario; NetApp; Nimble Storage; Pure
Storage; SolidFire; Tintri
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays"
"Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays"
Climbing the Slope
SaaS Archiving of Messaging Data

Definition: Software-as-a-service (SaaS) archiving of messaging data involves email, instant

messaging (IM), public social, business social and text/SMS data. Compliance and regulatory

requirements drive the retention of messaging data, with SaaS archiving increasingly becoming the
repository of choice. The capture of messaging content occurs at the time of creation or as it enters
the organization's communications systems, where it can be stored on immutable, write once-read
many storage.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: SaaS-archiving solutions are mature. Many users find
the administration tools for SaaS archiving solutions more user-friendly than those available from
on-premises solutions. As the journaling feature is turned on in the email administration console,
capture is as simple as pointing the journaled email to the hosted provider's site. IM archiving is as
mature as email, and it is often stored in an email format in the archive repository. Public social
media and business social archiving are newer, and their capture is usually through APIs provided
by the social media applications. Although social media data can be stored in an email format in the
archive, the industry trend is to store it in native format. Capture of text messaging data is becoming
more popular as well.
Unlike backup or disaster recovery as a service, archive users are less concerned about latency and
more interested in the accurate capture of metadata and the chain of custody of data; therefore, the
speed of the internet connections is not a major concern. This, coupled with prevalence of easy-to-
use administrative and supervision tools, has led many organizations to choose a hosted solution.
This has enabled archive expenses to shift to an operating expenditure (opex) model and away from
capital expenditure (capex).
As government and industry regulations proliferate, SaaS-archiving vendors have been nimble at
updating the compliance requirements of offered solutions. Most SaaS-archiving vendors offer end
users access to messaging data through a search interface or, in some cases, a native application
folder view. Basic e-discovery capabilities of hosted solutions have received high marks from
customers and are noted as another reason for adoption. Microsoft Office 365 is having an impact
on this market because native archiving and discovery features on that platform are improving.
User Advice: Organizations in highly regulated industries will find SaaS message-archiving
solutions to be mature, secure and reliable enough to meet the most stringent requirements.
Organizations with message-archiving needs will find the hosted option easy to administer and
attractively priced. They will find that it offers an opportunity to optimize internal IT resources. Most
organizations do not face internal or external requirements or regulations that require the data to
reside on-premises, so the willingness to consider the cloud revolves primarily around company
culture of risk, security, data sovereignty and costs.
When considering a solution, focus on indexing, search and discovery capabilities to ensure that
your needs are met by the offering or through integration with a third-party e-discovery vendor. The
migration of legacy email archives, including into and out of a hosted solution, can be expensive
and should be scoped during the selection phase. In SaaS-archiving contracts, organizations
should include an exit strategy that minimizes costs, and remember that they, not the SaaS
providers, own the data. When determining the costs versus benefits for SaaS archiving, include
soft expenses associated with on-premises solutions for personnel and IT-involved discovery
requests.

Business Impact: Organizations switch capex for opex costs when selecting a hosted archive
solution. Pricing is typically based on a per-mailbox or a per-user basis, paid as a monthly
subscription. IT departments are relieved of the responsibility for updating legacy, on-premises
archive systems when hardware and software need to be refreshed. Compliance and legal
personnel within organizations directly access the hosted solution without IT involvement, and can
more easily provide access to the hosted archive message data to outside parties, as required.
Sample Vendors: Bloomberg; Global Relay; Google; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Microsoft;
Mimecast; Proofpoint; Smarsh; Sonian; Veritas
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving"
"Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Information Archiving"
"Plan Your Data Exit Strategy Before You Sign a SaaS Contract"
"How to Determine Whether Your Organization Needs Website Archiving"
"Five Factors to Consider When Choosing Between Cloud and On-Premises Email Archiving
Solutions"
Definition: Storage multitenancy features enable the secure sharing of a storage system between
users running diverse workloads and managing users' performance to service-level objectives.
Multitenancy features generally include one or more of the following: logical partitioning, large
primary or secondary cache configurations, autotiering, I/O prioritization and/or throttling, QoS
features that set IOPS floors and ceilings or manage response times, balanced host and back-end
bandwidth, file virtualization, and clustered or distributed file support.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The widespread adoption of server virtualization,
virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the move to 24/7 operations and competition from the cloud are
driving storage consolidation and the deployment of private cloud infrastructures. These trends, in
turn, are driving the adoption of scale-out storage systems and increasing the importance of
multitenancy features.
User Advice: Multitenancy support should not be treated as a primary evaluation criterion, but a
use case that affects the weighting of other, more basic measures of storage system attractiveness,
such as scalability and availability, performance/throughput, ecosystem support, and vendor
support capabilities. Users should minimize risk associated with deploying shared storage arrays by

testing to scale and negotiating performance/throughput guarantees with meaningful remedies that
are not punitive, yet enforceable, and span diverse workloads.
Business Impact: Good multitenancy features increase the probability of success of storage
consolidation projects that can lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by reducing the total number of
storage systems being managed. Consolidation projects also have the potential to improve data
protection, simplify disaster recovery testing, and improve the value of green storage technologies
by increasing the average configuration of systems deployed. Larger configurations may enable
users to deploy high-end rather than midrange storage systems. They increase the probability of
applications being contained within a single storage system, which simplifies data protection and
disaster recovery testing. Larger configurations increase the value of green storage technologies,
such as thin provisioning, autotiering and data reduction technologies by making it practical to
configure a storage system with usable amounts of second-level cache and/or separately
identifiable tiers of storage.
Sample Vendors: DataDirect Networks (DDN); EMC; Fujitsu; Hitachi Data Systems; Hewlett
Packard Enterprise; IBM; NetApp; Nimble Storage; Tegile Systems; Tintri
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays"
Solid-State Arrays
Analysis By: Joseph Unsworth; John Monroe
Definition: Solid-state arrays (SSAs) are a subcategory of the broader external controller-based
(ECB) storage market. SSAs are scalable, dedicated solutions based solely on semiconductor
technology for data storage that cannot be configured with hard-disk drives (HDDs) at any time. As
distinct from solid-state drive (SSD)-only racks configured within ECB storage arrays, SSAs must be
stand-alone products denoted with a specific name and model number. They typically include an
OS and data management software that are optimized for solid-state technology.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The SSA market started to take shape in 2012, amid
a flurry of startup activity and innovation driven by the falling prices of flash memory, but its true
promise and speed of adoption were not well-understood. The picture is much more lucid in 2016,
as all incumbents now offer at least one SSA product, and the flood of early startups has distilled to
a handful of companies vying for customers. Most, but not all, companies offer a complete set of
data services. The most exceptional are built around simplicity and possessing-capable storage
efficiency, data protection and, of course, predictable performance.
The maturation of the market over the last three years not only witnessed many acquisitions, but
also several company failures as funding dried up. More companies are expected due to the

reinvention of SSAs for an even higher-performance capability predicated on NVMe PCIe SSDs and
eventually complemented by next-generation memory, such as 3D XPoint. Startups are not the only
companies pursuing this next-generation tier. Most existing players in the market are as well, which
will foster even more competition, innovation and dynamism in the market.
User Advice: IT professionals must assess their past and present application workload demands to
determine performance, capacity and availability requirements. This will be an essential first step to
determine the most cost-effective solutions that provide the appropriate data services to meet
future workload demands.
Users should demand that SSA vendors include the following as "must do" parts of their
competitive strategy:
■ Qualify and reliably integrate consumer-grade flash technology to provide higher-capacity

solutions that can be sold for less than $5 per raw (uncompressed and without support/
services) gigabyte.
■ Provide total cost of ownership (TCO) analyses of performance efficiencies, energy savings and
space conservation relating to specific application workloads.
■ Embody flexibly selectable thin provisioning, in-line deduplication, in-line data compression,
cross-application quality of service (to prevent inconsistent performance from the "noisy
neighbor" effect), at-rest and on-the-fly encryption, high availability, and disaster recovery (by
means of local/metro synchronous and remote asynchronous replication) in most, if not all, SSA
configurations.
■ Prove your company capable of providing competent and enduring global support and services,
flexible maintenance programs, and guarantees around performance, storage efficiency and
high availability.
■ Outline a clear roadmap predicated on continued cost reductions, flexibility to accommodate
upcoming solid-state technology, predictive analytics and ease of management.
IT professionals must weigh their actual needs against the cost and features of the available
solutions when considering adoption. IT professionals should also remain cautious in deployment
and select only financially stable and proven system suppliers that have strong direct or indirect
partnerships that can enable them to deliver competent and enduring support and services.
Business Impact: Compared with the legacy HDD-based and hybrid HDD-/SSD-based arrays,
SSAs remain relatively expensive on a raw dollar-per-gigabyte basis, but when storage efficiency
and TCO are factored in, they can become quite compelling and even cheaper than HDD-based
storage arrays, depending on the environment. The greatest opportunities for deployment are for
performance usage in database and high-performance computing and consolidation in highly
virtualized environments, such as virtualized server infrastructure and hosted virtual desktop
infrastructure. SSAs are also increasingly being used in analytics and data warehouse environments.
SSAs already have proved to be a dynamic subset of the ECB market arenas; SSA revenue grew by
116% in 2015, expanding from $1.25 billion to $2.70 billion. Gartner predicts that the SSA share will
approach almost 50% (more than $9.6 billion) of the total ECB market, with a 29.0% compound

annual growth rate (CAGR), from 2015 through 2020. Legacy ECB storage arrays, while still at
approximately $11 billion, will display a negative 11.0% CAGR from 2015 through 2020.
The legacy ECB arrays and SSAs will reflect a symbiotic evolution as the markets move toward the
all-flash data centers of the future. Efficient data management software that seamlessly integrates
the benefits of variously configured storage tiers, and can be closely coupled with the host OS,
increasingly will become an imperative measure for long-term success.
Sample Vendors: EMC; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Hitachi Data Systems; Huawei; IBM;
Kaminario; NetApp; Pure Storage; Tegile Systems; Violin Memory
"Solid-State Array TCO Reality Check"
"Moving Toward the All Solid-State Storage Data Center"
"The Top 10 Must-Ask Questions When Evaluating Solid-State Storage Arrays"
"Evaluation Criteria for Solid-State Arrays"
Automatic Storage Tiering

Definition: Automatic storage tiering moves pages of a logical volume or file between processor
memory, tiers of cache and storage. Page movements are transparent to applications except for
their potential impact on performance and throughput. Page movements are managed by policies
and/or algorithms with the objectives of minimizing storage costs while meeting performance and
throughput service-level agreements. Solid-state technologies, such as flash or 3D XPoint, can be
managed as cache or as an identifiable tier of storage.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Autotiering has made flash usage in general-purpose
storage systems commonplace. Indeed, most general-purpose disk arrays now being sold are
hybrids configured with flash and HDDs. Most flash is packaged as SSDs using the SAS protocol,
but PCIe cards that bypass high-latency protocols are finding increased adoption. Users taking
advantage of autotiering and SSDs or PCIe cards are able to decrease their storage acquisition and
ownership costs without sacrificing performance and throughput by enabling users to replace

10,000 rpm or 15,000 rpm high-performance HDDs with low-cost, high-capacity 7,200 rpm hard-
disk drives (HDDs). The use of SSDs or PCIe-based solid-state technologies and low-cost, high-
capacity 7,200 rpm HDDs also improves mean time between data losses (MTBDLs) in two ways.
Solid-state technologies provide advance notice of failures, and using high-capacity HDDs reduces
the number of HDDs in the system, which reduces the number of components in the system that
can fail and hence the frequency of repair activities. This also reduces its environmental footprint
relative to a system configured to an equivalent capacity.
User Advice: Allow potential suppliers to benchmark the workloads their storage systems will
support before they configure the systems they will bid, and then use their performance claims as
the basis of performance guarantees with meaningful remedies. This increases the probability of
proposed configurations meeting or exceeding performance SLAs, and gives storage suppliers at
least partial ownership of any performance-related problems. Continually monitor performance and
throughput, resize cache and storage, and adjust policies as indicated to accommodate changes in
workload characteristics. When deploying autotiering software in a storage system that is being
replicated to a disaster recovery site, take into account the impact of autotiering on replication and
failover performance at the disaster recovery site.
Business Impact: The value of autotiering is proportional to system capacity, the ratio of active to
stale data and the locality of references to application data. Multitenancy and security requirements
influence the usability of autotiering features because of their ability to influence cache data access
patterns and management, which in turn influence system performance and usable scalability.
Autotiering implementations that are autonomic or near-autonomic in their operation may further
lower storage total cost of ownership (TCO) by improving staff productivity.
Sample Vendors: Dell; EMC; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Hitachi Data Systems; IBM; Infinidat;
NetApp; Nimble Storage; Tegile; Tintri
Recommended Reading: "Save Storage Admin Costs, Stop Storage Array Tuning"
"Technology Overview for I/O Optimization Software"
"Overcome Disk Autotiering Problems With These Deployment Recommendations"
"How Much and What Type of Disk Storage Do IT Departments Need?"
"Where to Use SSDs in Your Storage Infrastructure"
"Solid-State Drives Will Complement, Not Replace, Hard-Disk Drives in Data Centers"
"Use SSDs, Rather Than Disk Striping, to Improve Storage Performance and Cut Costs"

Enterprise Information Archiving
Definition: Enterprise information archiving (EIA) solutions provide tools for capturing data into a
distributed or centralized repository for compliance and efficiency. EIA supports multiple data types
(including email, file system, social media, business social, website, and mobile). These tools
provide access to archived data in the repository or through a plug-in to the native application via a
pointer or via browser access, and some manage the data in place. EIA tools support operational
efficiency, compliance, retention management and e-discovery.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The number of vendors offering EIA solutions has
stabilized and, in some cases, there has been consolidation in the market. Driven by awareness
created through Microsoft Office 365 adoption, archiving is becoming mainstream for meeting
compliance and e-discovery needs for organizations implementing information governance
programs. SaaS for messaging data archiving, including email and social media, has also gained
significant traction.
Support for the capture and supervision of social media has become a requirement in regulated
industries. File archiving has slowed, with a focus on selective archiving for records. EIA products
that support multiple content types are the norm. Many companies are looking to replace their
archiving products with newer ones (particularly SaaS solutions), and many migration services are
available. In addition, there is growing interest in managing the compliance and retention of data "in
place," rather than moving it to a different repository.
The appetite for email-only archiving solutions remains; however, most organizations are looking to
vendors with existing solutions or a roadmap for EIA products.
User Advice: As requirements to store, search and discover old data grow, companies are
implementing an EIA solution, starting with email as the first managed content type. Many
organizations are looking to migrate to cloud email and productivity solutions, such as those offered
by Microsoft and Google, and when migrating, associated compliance and regulatory retention
requirements need to be considered. In addition, organizations should have an overall data retention
plan including the need to archive additional content types. EIA use cases are growing to include
records management and analytics capabilities. Organizations must ensure contractually that they
have a reasonably priced process, as well as an option for extracting data from an archive solution
— namely from SaaS providers. Migrating personal stores to the archive should be part of the
deployment of an email archive system.
Business Impact: EIA improves application performance, delivers improved service to users, and
enables a timely response to legal discovery and business requests for historical information.
Archived data can be stored in a less-expensive fashion, with the opportunity to take some data
offline or delete it. Moving old data to an archive also reduces backup and recovery times by
decreasing the active dataset.
Email remains the predominant content type archived as part of an EIA implementation. Archiving
offered via SaaS is increasing in popularity, because of the benefits associated with offloading low-

business-value tasks to a third party, as well as the reduced capital expense. SaaS-based message
data archiving is leading the way and is currently priced on a per-user, per-month basis, with no
storage overages. As cost structure and integration issues are ironed out, more file system data and
application data will be archived in the cloud. In additional, more organizations are seeking to create
a holistic information governance strategy, including analytics of all data, so the right selection of an
archiving or retention solution becomes even more imperative.
EIA is an important part of e-discovery, providing support for the Electronic Discovery Reference
Model. Legal hold, retention management, search and export features are used to meet discovery
and compliance requirements. Supervision tools for sampling and reviewing messages are available
with many EIA products, in response to requirements specific to the regulated portion of the
financial industry. To meet the requirements of mobile workers, EIA offers a way for organizations to
keep data compliant in an archive, while providing access via mobile devices.
Sample Vendors: Bloomberg; EMC; Global Relay; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; IBM; Microsoft;
Mimecast; Proofpoint; Smarsh; Veritas
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving"
"Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Information Archiving"
"Plan Your Data Exit Strategy Before You Sign a SaaS Contract"
"Organizations Will Need to Tackle Three Challenges to Curb Unstructured Data Glut and Neglect"
"How to Determine Whether Your Organization Needs Website Archiving"
Data Deduplication
Analysis By: Dave Russell
Definition: Data deduplication is a unique form of compression that eliminates redundant data on a
subfile level to improve storage utilization. Redundant data is eliminated, leaving only a pointer to
the extraneous copies of the data. Compared to traditional compression, deduplication has a
broader scope for comparing redundant data, such as across multiple users, VMs, backup jobs or
storage array volumes, and examines data that has been written over a longer period of time,
sometimes with greater levels of granularity.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: This technology reduces the amount of physical
storage required, significantly improving the economics of disk-, flash- or memory-based solutions
for backup, archiving and primary storage. While deduplication has historically been used in backup

activities (due to the repetitive nature of capturing largely unchanged data), it can be applied to
long-term archiving and primary storage.
Deduplication has taken on a vital role in solid-state array (SSA) and hybrid flash array storage
appliances in an effort to contain the cost of the flash solution while maximizing capacity. As such,
nearly all flash storage and hybrid flash array devices possess some form of deduplication.
User Advice: Solutions vary in terms of where and when deduplication takes place, which can
significantly affect performance and ease of installation. When used with backup, deduplication that
occurs on a protected machine is referred to as "client-side" or "source" deduplication.
Deduplication that takes place after it leaves the protected machine — after the data is sent to the
backup application — is considered "target-side" deduplication. A distinction is also made between
solutions that deduplicate the data as it is processed ("in-line" deduplication) and products that
write data directly to disk, as they would without deduplication, and then deduplicate it later, which
is "post-processing" or "deferred" deduplication. Deduplication solutions also vary in granularity,
but 4KB to 128KB segments of data are typical. Some deduplication algorithms are content-aware,
meaning that they apply special logic for further processing, depending on the type of application
and data being stored, and/or can factor out metadata from an application, such as a backup
program.
Gartner clients using deduplication for backup typically report seven to 25 times the reduction (a 7-
to-1 to 25-to-1 ratio) in the size of data. Archiving deduplication ratios are often in the 3-to-1 to 10-
to-1 range, and primary data commonly yields 3-to-1 to 6-to-1 ratios, with all flash array (AFA) ratios
sometimes reaching 8-to-1 on a consistent basis. Restore performance can be negatively affected
by deduplication, depending on the solution and media implemented, as data must be rehydrated.
Given the costs associated with flash storage, deduplication is an essential capability for improving
the economics and wear endurance of flash, and it should be considered a "must have" feature
because there is no performance trade-off for flash deduplication as there can be for disk
deduplication.
Business Impact: Deduplication improves the cost structure of storage because less storage needs
to be purchased, deployed, powered and cooled. As a result, businesses may be able to use disk,
flash or DRAM memory for more of their storage requirements, and/or may retain data for longer
periods of time, thus enabling faster recovery or read access versus retrieval from slower media.
The additional benefits of deduplication include its positive impact on disaster recovery (DR)
because less network connectivity is required, since each input/output (I/O) operation carries a
larger data payload.
Sample Vendors: Actifio; EMC; ExaGrid; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; NetApp; Permabit; Pure
Storage; Quantum; SimpliVity; Veritas Technologies

"Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances"
Network-Based Replication Appliances

Definition: Network-based replication appliances provide storage-vendor-neutral block-level and/or

network-attached storage (NAS) replication services. Local snapshots, clones, continuous data
protection (CDP), remote replication (synchronous and asynchronous) and consistency groups or
their equivalent are commonly offered services. Network-based replication solutions can provide a
wider span of view than server- and storage-system-based solutions. Instantiations can be via
virtual or physical servers.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Offloading replication services from storage systems
into a network-based replication appliance provides operational and financial advantages,
compared with software- and controller-based solutions. Operational benefits include preserving
native storage system performance, providing common replication services across multiple
heterogeneous storage systems, and protecting both SAN and DAS storage with the same
technology, which can simplify disaster recovery by creating a constant timeline or consistency
group across multiple storage systems. Network-based replication also reduces the strength of
storage vendor lock-ins, which can lower storage ownership costs by keeping storage system
acquisitions competitive. Despite these financial and operational advantages, market acceptance
has been hampered by:
■ A strong end-user reluctance to add anything to the input/output path because of concerns
about I/O bottlenecks, I/O elongation and creating another potential single point of failure
(SPOF)
■ Competition from storage virtualization appliances
■ The idea of replacing a server or storage-array-based solution that already works and has been
tested
The increasing number of storage systems that use all-inclusive software-pricing models
User Advice: Users should consider network-based replication appliances when there is:
■ A need to create a constant timeline across multiple homogeneous or heterogeneous storage

systems
■ A problem with the usability or performance of the existing replication solution

■ A need to preserve investments in existing storage systems
■ A reluctance to invest in older installed storage systems
■ A desire to pursue a dual-vendor strategy or put incumbent storage vendors on notice that you
are dissatisfied with their pricing or postsales support
Users should ensure that replication appliance microcode overhead and network latency do not
create performance/throughput bottlenecks when protecting solid-state arrays (SSAs) and/or solid-
state drives (SSDs).
Business Impact: Network-based replication appliance services can:
■ Provide the benefits of storage-based replication solutions without the lock-ins that storage-
system-based replication solutions create.
■ Delay storage system upgrades by offloading replication overhead from a storage system that
lacks the compute power and bandwidth needed to limit the impact of replication services on
native system performance.
■ Work with DAS, SANs and NAS.
■ Provide heterogeneous replication targets to allow lower-cost solutions.
Sample Vendors: DataCore Software; EMC; FalconStor; Hitachi Data Systems; Huawei; IBM;
NetApp; Zerto
Recommended Reading: "Slow Storage Replication Requires the Redesign of Disaster Recovery
Infrastructures"
"Decision Point for Data Replication for HA/DR"
Continuous Data Protection

Analysis By: Dave Russell
Definition: Continuous data protection (CDP) is an approach to recovery that continuously, or

nearly continuously, captures and transmits changes to applications, files or blocks of data while
journaling these changes. This capability provides the option to recover to many more-granular
points in time to minimize data loss. Some CDP solutions can be configured to capture data either
continuously (true CDP) or at scheduled times (near CDP).
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The difference between near CDP and regular backup
is that backup is typically performed once, to only a few (typically no more than two to four times), a

day, whereas near CDP is often done every few minutes or hours, providing many more recovery
options and minimizing any potential data loss. Several products also provide the ability to
heterogeneously replicate and migrate data between two different types of disk devices, allowing for
potential cost savings for disaster recovery solutions. Checkpoints of consistent states are used to
enable rapid recovery to known good states (such as before a patch was applied to an OS, or the
last time a database was reorganized) to ensure application consistency of the data and minimize
the number of log transactions that must be applied.
CDP and near-CDP capabilities can be packaged as server-based software (most common), as
network-based appliances (today less common) that sit between servers and storage, or as part of
a storage controller. Storage controllers offer near CDP only by way of the frequent use of
snapshots, and do not allow for the capture, journaling and transmission of every write activity. The
delineation between frequent snapshots (one to four per hour or less granularity) and near CDP is
not crisp, and administrators often implement snapshots and CDP solutions in a near-CDP manner
to strike a balance between resource utilization and improved recovery.
User Advice: Consider CDP for critical data where regular snapshots and/or backups do not enable
meeting the required recovery point objectives (RPOs). Gartner has observed that true CDP
implementations are most commonly deployed for files, email and laptop data. True CDP for
databases and other applications is not common and has a much lower market penetration. Near
CDP for applications might be more appropriate to ensure application consistency, and minimize
the amount of disk and potential processor cycles required for the solution.
CDP can be an effective countermeasure against ransomware.
Many large vendors have acquired their current offerings, and very few startup vendors remain, with
most startups being acquired or having failed. Many backup applications include CDP technology
as an option to their backup portfolio. The market has since mostly adopted near-CDP solutions via
more frequent, array-based snapshots or as part of the backup application. The disk requirements
and potential production application performance impact were among the main reasons for true
CDP initially facing challenges. Later, as near CDP became more readily available, it satisfied most
of the market's needs.
Business Impact: CDP can dramatically change the way data is protected, decreasing backup and
recovery times, as well as reducing the amount of lost data, and can provide additional recovery
points. Compared to traditional backup, which typically captures data once a day, the amount of
data lost in a restore situation can be nearly 24 hours for backup versus minutes or a few hours with
CDP.
Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience
Sample Vendors: Actifio; Arcserve; Catalogic Software; CloudEndure; Code42; Commvault;

DataCore Software; EMC; Microsoft; Vision Solutions

Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated
Appliances"
External Storage Virtualization

Analysis By: Roger W. Cox
Definition: Storage virtualization is a technology that sits between host servers and the external
controller-based (ECB) storage system infrastructure. In most cases, it provides a virtual view of the
physical storage devices, and aggregates the devices into a common resource pool for presentation
to the compute environment. Storage virtualization can be provided by hardware appliances, or by
software within an ECB storage system. Vendors sometimes use "storage hypervisor" to describe
their storage virtualization offering.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Besides virtualizing multiple physical, and often
disparate ECB storage systems into a common storage pool, most storage virtualization solutions
provide other services, such as common provisioning, including thin provisioning, as well as local
and remote replication data services. Some even support storage efficiency features, such as tiered
storage and data reduction.
Storage virtualization can be implemented as symmetrical or asymmetrical solutions. In a

symmetrical (or in-band) approach, the layers of abstraction and processing used by the
virtualization solution are inserted directly into the data path. In an asymmetrical (or out-of-band)
approach, the abstraction and processing control lie outside the data path. Storage virtualization
appliances, software-only offerings intended to create appliances, and ECB storage array-based
software solutions employ the symmetrical implementation. However, asymmetrical
implementations use storage area network (SAN) switches in conjunction with appliances.
Even though functionality and scalability have improved since this technology was introduced in
1999, market traction remains muted relative to the overall size of the ECB storage system market.
This minimal market traction can be attributed, in part, to the following:
■ Some segments of the ECB storage system market, such as installations supporting
mainframes and network-attached storage, are not broadly supported by storage virtualization
solutions.
■ Some silo applications, such as data warehousing and Microsoft Exchange, do not fit within the
storage virtualization solution model.
■ There are challenges associated with establishing or validating a compelling value proposition,
compared with a conventional storage infrastructure composed of multiple ECB storage
systems.
■ Only four major storage vendors support an organic, symmetrical in-band storage virtualization
solution — EMC, which launched Federated Tiered Storage for its Symmetrix Storage platform
in May 2012, and its VPLEX in May 2010; Hitachi (Hitachi Data Systems), which launched its

Universal Volume Manager in August 2004; IBM, which launched the SVC in June 2003 and the
Storwize V7000 in October 2010; and NetApp, which released the V-Series in March 2005 (now
withdrawn from NetApp's product card) and its FlexArray virtualization software option in
February 2014.
Although it is a close race, current market momentum, from a vendor revenue perspective, favors
the symmetrical in-band storage virtualization appliances from EMC (VPLEX) and IBM (SVC).
However, symmetrical in-band storage virtualization solutions that are incorporated within an ECB
storage system from Hitachi (Hitachi Data Systems) (Universal Volume Manager), IBM (Storwize
V7000/V5000) and NetApp (FlexArray virtualization option) are gaining increasing market share as
cost-effective migration tools.
User Advice: Current offerings tend to attack different problems or segments of the market, so
users should carefully examine what they want to accomplish before comparing products. Consider
these devices for mass-volume migration between ECB storage systems, for management
improvement, where the software tools are better than existing arrays, and for consolidation/
transition to a single-storage vendor when the user owns ECB storage systems from many vendors.
Be aware that storage virtualization creates vendor lock-in, and most (but not all) disable the value-
added data services and caching features of the ECB storage systems being virtualized. Therefore,
cost justifications must be scrutinized in detail to guard against paying twice for the same features.
Business Impact: Storage virtualization eases migration from old to new ECB storage systems, and
it enables temporary consolidation of older ECB storage systems prior to moving to a single-vendor
solution. In addition, migrating existing ECB storage infrastructures to cloud paradigms is sparking
interest in storage virtualization offerings as a bridge to a cloud environment, by repurposing
existing investments in a storage infrastructure. It can improve provisioning and other storage
management to the extent that it provides better software tools, and it can sometimes reduce the
cost of the back-end storage. However, storage administrators must still manage the ECB storage
systems to perform basic low-level configuration tasks.
Sample Vendors: DataCore Software; EMC; FalconStor; Hitachi; IBM; NetApp
Recommended Reading: "Storage Virtualization"
"Decision Point for Server Virtualization Storage Selection"
"Storage Virtualization: Steppingstone to a Better Environment"

Entering the Plateau
EFSS
Analysis By: Monica Basso
Definition: Enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) refers to a range of on-premises or
cloud-based capabilities that enable individuals to synchronize and share documents, photos,
videos and files across mobile devices, PCs and servers. Sharing can happen within the
organization or outside of it, with partners, customers or others. Security and collaboration are
critical complementary features for enterprises adoption.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: EFSS technology is relatively mature; its basic
features include native mobile and web client apps, password protection and data encryption, and
server integration (with SharePoint, for example), whereas its enhanced ones include content
creation, collaboration, digital rights management, cloud encryption key management (EKM) and
modern responsive user interface (UI). Leading vendors offer integration with Microsoft's Office 365.
Over the past six years, EFSS adoption has grown rapidly to hundreds of users, thus driving
progressive standardization. A variety of IT vendors in multiple markets (such as enterprise content
management [ECM], collaboration, storage, backup and enterprise mobility management [EMM])
added file synchronization and sharing features as extensions to their offerings. EFSS puts pressure
on traditional markets, such as ECM and storage, forcing an evolution in EFSS functionality to
include cloud, mobile and analytics paradigms, to enhance user experience, IT administration and
business support. Cloud storage providers such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon accelerate
commoditization, bundling EFSS for minimal price into broader deals.
EFSS destination vendors are evolving in two different directions: data infrastructure modernization
(that is, enterprise systems/resources integration and management with support for federation, e-
discovery, data governance and security); or modern content collaboration and business
enablement. Despite concerns that security and compliance may slow down adoption, EFSS
investments continue to grow as organizations must balance IT control over bring your own (BYO)
cloud services with users' demand for modern productivity tools. Adoption of Microsoft Office 365
has driven significant interest into OneDrive for Business, but Dropbox and Box Enterprise continue
to be users' preferred options and Google offers the best alternative for real-time document
collaboration.
User Advice: IT leaders responsible for digital workplace initiatives must consider EFSS. To work
more effectively, organizations must explore potential security risks of personal cloud services, as
well as users' requirements for modern productivity tools. They should evaluate EFSS options and
capabilities to enable secure mobile content sharing, collaboration and productivity, thus reducing
potential risks. If email or legacy FTP services are used for file transfers, organizations should
consider EFSS as an efficient and potentially more secure way for employees to share data, rather
than using personal services. Organizations looking for secure alternatives to personal cloud while
preserving user preferences, and those that are especially focusing on external collaboration,
should consider public cloud offerings such as Box Enterprise or Dropbox. Organizations with
tighter data control requirements, or with a large storage infrastructure, should focus on hybrid

solutions (such as Citrix, Syncplicity and Egnyte) that allow the organization to maintain more
control over where data is housed and leverage existing storage investments. Organizations with
strong requirements for data protection, or organizations that have strict regulations about data
location and residency or complex data manipulation requirements, should focus on private cloud
or on-premises EFSS deployments.
Business Impact: Enterprise file sharing will enable higher productivity and collaboration for mobile
workers who deal with multiple devices, and lead to a more agile and connected workforce.
Organizations investing in such capabilities will enable a more modern and collaborative real-time
workplace, while reducing or avoiding the inherent security/compliance threats of personal cloud
services. Business benefits include increased productivity and cost savings.
Sample Vendors: Accellion; Box; Citrix; Ctera Networks; Dropbox; Egnyte; Google; Intralinks;
Microsoft; ownCloud
Recommended Reading: "The EFSS Market's Future Will Present an Opportunity for IT Planners"
"How to Build EFSS Plans to Address Current and Future Business Requirements"
"Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing"
"Toolkit: Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing RFI/RFP"
Appendixes

Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2015
expectations Integrated Backup Appliances

Software-Defined Storage
Information Dispersal Algorithms
Cloud-Based Backup Services
Virtual Storage Appliance Data Sanitization
Open-Source Storage Object Storage
Integrated Systems: Hyperconvergence Storage Cluster File Systems
Solid-State DIMMs Linear Tape File System (LTFS)
Copy Data Management Online Data Compression
File Analysis
Disaster Recovery as a Service
Enterprise Endpoint Backup
Cross-Platform Structured External Storage Virtualization
Hybrid DIMMs Data Archiving Data Encryption Technologies,
I/O Optimization
Emerging Data Storage HDDs and SSDs
Protection Schemes Continuous Data Protection
Cloud Storage
Gateway Data Deduplication
Virtual Machine Enterprise Information Archiving
Backup and Appliance-Based Replication
Recovery
Solid-State Arrays
Public Cloud Storage Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS)
Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Storage Multitenancy
SaaS Archiving of Messaging Data
Automatic Storage Tiering As of July 2015
Innovation Peak of
Trough of Plateau of
Trigger Inflated Slope of Enlightenment
Disillusionment Productivity
Expectations
time
Plateau will be reached in:
obsolete
less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years before plateau

Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels
Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases
Phase Definition
Innovation Trigger A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant
press and industry interest.
Peak of Inflated During this phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of well-publicized
Expectations activity by technology leaders results in some successes, but more failures, as the
technology is pushed to its limits. The only enterprises making money are conference
organizers and magazine publishers.
Trough of Because the technology does not live up to its overinflated expectations, it rapidly becomes
Disillusionment unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a few cautionary tales.
Slope of Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of
Enlightenment organizations lead to a true understanding of the technology's applicability, risks and
benefits. Commercial off-the-shelf methodologies and tools ease the development process.
Plateau of Productivity The real-world benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Tools and
methodologies are increasingly stable as they enter their second and third generations.
Growing numbers of organizations feel comfortable with the reduced level of risk; the rapid
growth phase of adoption begins. Approximately 20% of the technology's target audience
has adopted or is adopting the technology as it enters this phase.
Years to Mainstream The time required for the technology to reach the Plateau of Productivity.
Adoption
Table 2. Benefit Ratings
Benefit Rating Definition
Transformational Enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry
dynamics
High Enables new ways of performing horizontal or vertical processes that will result in significantly
increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise
Moderate Provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue
or cost savings for an enterprise
Low Slightly improves processes (for example, improved user experience) that will be difficult to
translate into increased revenue or cost savings

Table 3. Maturity Levels
Maturity Level Status Products/Vendors
Embryonic ■ In labs ■ None
Emerging ■ Commercialization by vendors ■ First generation
■ Pilots and deployments by industry leaders ■ High price
■ Much customization
Adolescent ■ Maturing technology capabilities and process ■ Second generation

understanding
■ Less customization
■ Uptake beyond early adopters
Early mainstream ■ Proven technology ■ Third generation
■ Vendors, technology and adoption rapidly evolving ■ More out of box
■ Methodologies
Mature ■ Robust technology ■ Several dominant vendors

mainstream
■ Not much evolution in vendors or technology
Legacy ■ Not appropriate for new developments ■ Maintenance revenue focus
■ Cost of migration constrains replacement
Obsolete ■ Rarely used ■ Used/resale market only
Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
"Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles"
"2015 Strategic Roadmap for Storage"
More on This Topic

This is part of an in-depth collection of research. See the collection:
■ Gartner's 2016 Hype Cycles Highlight Digital Business Ecosystems

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G00302826

Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2016

Analyst(s): Pushan Rinnen, Julia Palmer

This Hype Cycle evaluates storage-related hardware and software

Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases................................................................................................................. 60

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2016.............................................................................4

Page 2 of 62 Gartner, Inc. | G00302826

The Hype Cycle

Gartner, Inc. | G00302826 Page 3 of 62

Data Backup Tools for Mobile Devices

Page 4 of 62 Gartner, Inc. | G00302826

Gartner, Inc. | G00302826 Page 5 of 62

benefit years to mainstream adoption

transformational Solid-State Arrays Data Deduplication Infrastructure SDS

high Continuous Data Enterprise Endpoint Cloud Data Backup

Integrated Systems: Information Dispersal

Object Storage Management SDS

Online Data Compression Open-Source Storage

Public Cloud Storage Shared Accelerated

moderate Disaster Recovery as a Automatic Storage Tiering Emerging Data Storage

Source: Gartner (July 2016)

Off the Hype Cycle

Page 6 of 62 Gartner, Inc. | G00302826

Shared Accelerated Storage

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Shared accelerated storage is an emerging

Gartner, Inc. | G00302826 Page 7 of 62

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Sample Vendors: E8 Storage; EMC; Mangstor; X-IO Technologies; Zstor

Recommended Reading: "Vendor Rating: EMC"

"Market Guide for In-Memory Computing Technologies"

"Market Trends: The Next-Generation Server-Side SSD Landscape"

Cloud Data Backup

Page 8 of 62 Gartner, Inc. | G00302826

Gartner, Inc. | G00302826 Page 9 of 62

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

"Data Backup/Recovery Factors to Consider When Adopting SaaS"

Definition: Management software-defined storage (SDS) coordinates the delivery of storage

Page 10 of 62 Gartner, Inc. | G00302826

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Gartner, Inc. | G00302826 Page 11 of 62

"Innovation Insight: Separating Hype From Hope for Software-Defined Storage"

"Technology Overview for I/O Optimization Software"

"Multivendor SDS: A Complex and Costly Myth"

"Should Your Enterprise Deploy a Software-Defined Data Center?"

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: FA is an emerging technology that assists

Page 12 of 62 Gartner, Inc. | G00302826

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Recommended Reading: "Market Guide for File Analysis Software"

"How to Move From Data Negligence to Effective Storage Management"

Data Backup Tools for Mobile Devices

Gartner, Inc. | G00302826 Page 13 of 62

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience