Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage

As an annual rendez-vous, Gartner unveils its Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage on October 1, 2021 and it invites to make comments, remarks and even critics. The exercice is not easy even for analysts as the market changed rapidly.

And of course, many companies immediately published a press release claiming victory or proudness to be listed and we can understand why especially for small players. We find Nutanix, Pure Storage, Qumulo, Scality and Weka promotional content or press release.

The first comment is the confirmation of the presence of established players such DDN, Dell, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage and Qumulo and others ones. Dell is no longer positioned in the middle of the leaders sub-quadrant and other vendors stopped to be positioned relatively from that Dell position.

The other surprise comes from the position of the list of vendors listed above in the quadrant and we could ask the analyst team why for some vendors the consider only one product and for others multiple. Considering multiple products should improve the position of the vendor as adding the portfolio effect make things better. For instance why limit Pure Storage to FlashBlade as FlashArray can expose industry standard file sharing protocols. Same remark for Quantum as the only product listed is ActiveScale, why Gartner doesn’t consider StorNext and ATFS? Why NetApp analysis is limited to StorageGRID? Especially when for IBM, they consider Spectrum Scale and Cloud Object Storage or for Dell PowerScale and ECS. This is not very fair.

Coupling file and object makes sense as the market see some convergence but what about pure players. If we consider pure file storage players or pure object storage ones, they’re impacted by their positioning. But again why, we have all in mind very comprehensive products limited to one of these 2 parts that are not listed or badly positioned.

If you consider MinIO, this is amazing to not see them in the quadrant but we can understand that as they would have been badly positioned covering only the object side.

So we can imagine to filter this quadrant or have multi layers adding pure players in each category file and object.

Why Caringo, acquired by DataCore earlier this year, was dropped as it  was a pioneer of object storage launched in 2005.

VAST Data should also be listed demonstrating a unique trajectory many of its competitors dream about.

Same remark for Cohesity or Commvault with Hedvig technology now well promoted worldwide. We could even add Spectra Logic to this list of absent players.

Some of these non presences can be explained also with the desire from the vendor to not be positioned in the quadrant and they know what they did and why they did this.

Back the remark about file plus object products, it has a reality on the market but in that case, Gartner should consider and product a quadrant with only players doing that and again in that case some products would disappear and finally producing a radical different quadrant.

We regret some remarks we made in the past as finally Gartner ignored ours but also others made by key observers of the market. A the end of the day, it’s a product so a business for Gartner. But it exists and has of course its role with other similar reports, not without others. We recommend readers but above all buyers to check the 4 to 5 key reports in the domain that should participate and feed their buying decision.