Gartner is an independent provider of IT and research advice, Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Midrange and High-End Modular Disk Arrays assesses storage vendors on their “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision.” Placing the candidates into one of the four quadrants each representing different definitions.
So what does this mean?
- Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.
- Visionaries understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute well.
- Niche Players focus successfully on a small segment, or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
- Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.
And to be selected, the vendor must meet the following criteria:
- The vendor must have midrange and high-end modular disk array storage systems commercially available and have active references that are using them in production scenarios.
- The vendor must generate at least $25 million in annual midrange and high-end modular disk array hardware revenue.
- The vendor must actively market its branded midrange and high-end modular disk array products in at least two major regions (for example, North America and EMEA, or Japan and Asia/Pacific).
- The vendor must sell its branded midrange and high-end modular disk array products to user organizations via its direct sales force or through a reseller partnership sales channel.
from http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/research_mq.jsp
From an HP perspective – Gartner included the following HP Storage solutions:
- HP 3PAR
- HP LeftHand
- HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA)
So let’s dissect this and see what changes have occurred since the last period.
Certainly, there has been massive movement shown in this graph , EMC and NetApp’s gap closed slightly and HP’s ability to execute position increased dramtically as did its position in the visionaries quadrant, this is no doubt due to the acquiring, development and rise of it’s 3PAR platform.
There hasnt been much movement from HDS, Dell seems to have taken a sideways step in some ways, IBM remains static since the last period. Its hard to really say who really leads in this view, NetApp and EMC are “Leaders” and are performing or executing really efficiently however HP are also leaders and appear to have a better understanding of the market and where it is going.
I look forward to the 2012 version of this research release, it surely shows there is a healthy competitive environment for this area of technology. Well done to the leading four storage Vendors – EMC, NetApp, HP and IBM.
