Leaders in WW Object-Based Storage Market – IDC

A new vendor assessment and market analysis from International Data Corporation profiles the leading providers in the worldwide object-based storage (OBS) market.

The IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2013 Vendor Assessment report (35 pages, $15,000), written by Ashish Nadkarni and Amita Potnis, utilizes a scoring methodology that produces a definitive assessment of each vendor’s current market capabilities and strategies for competing in the future.

According to IDC’s research, Amplidata, Cleversafe, DataDirect Networks, EMC, and Scality hold prominent positions within the “Leaders” category for 2013.

Several other important players, including Caringo, Cloudian, HDS, and NetApp are identified as “Major Players” by IDC. Basho, Huawei, NEC, and Tarmin are included as “Contenders”.

OBS is still a market in its infancy and several suppliers of commercial OBS solutions have struggled to generate a meaningful revenue stream from their offerings. Some of the inhibitors to the adoption of object-storage platforms have been longer sales cycles, new vs. traditional architectures, and a platform divergence from general purpose or unified storage (i.e., one suited for many workloads) to one that is more workload specific in nature. Yet, OBS platforms offer a promising future for organizations trying to balance scale, complexity, and costs.

“What makes this market segment and this MarketScape interesting is the dynamic push/pull between commercial OBS architectures and the open source momentum we are seeing with OpenStack. This has strategic implications for the industry as a whole,” said Nadkarni, research director, storage systems. “Vendors of commercial OBS platforms in turn are announcing partner programs, joining alliances for standards, and making their offerings more purpose built or easy to adopt as a hedge against the proliferation of open source platforms.”

Additional findings include:

• In 2013, OBS solutions will account for nearly 37% of file-and-OBS (FOBS) market revenues
• Object platforms need to accommodate adjacent compute workloads along with data affinity or localization
• Emerging OBS technologies include: Compustorage (hyperconverged), Seagate Open Storage platform, and Intel’s efforts with OpenStack
• Larger market shares among the leading vendors does not necessarily imply a stronger OBS platform in terms of capabilities
• Other OBS vendors mentioned in the report include: Exablox, Inktank, SwiftStack, and Quantum.

This study assesses the capabilities and business strategies of leading vendors in the (scale-out) OBS market segment, which is part of the overall file-and-OBS market. This evaluation is based on a comprehensive framework and a set of parameters that gauge the success of a vendor to be successful in delivering an OBS solution in the market. This study includes analysis of the 13 most notable players in the commercial OBS market, with broader portfolios and global scale.