Gartner Magic Quadrant 2024 for Primary Storage Platforms Bizarre

As an annual exercise and we have to admit waited by the storage ecosystem, the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2024 for Primary Storage Platforms was published a few weeks ago. And this version is once again let’s say bizarre even if they extend the coverage with the term platforms. The report is available on various web sites, here from NetApp site, here from Pure Storage site or here from the HPE site to list a few, and the image is publicly available and displayed below.

Once again, Gartner makes a confusion with the reduction of primary storage to structured data limiting usage to database workloads essentially. They insisted on STaas and ransomware protection. Wow.

Let us clarify this: a primary storage is the role given by users and their applications to storage. It is not linked to access methods or data nature.

In other words, an enterprise can consider file and object storage as primary in addition to block storage due to the mission and business they have to support and deliver. For instance, an online image or video service leverages file or object storage being in that case a primary storage. A CRM application relies on database layered on disk file system generated on a block storage array. As AI is hot on the market, clearly applications use file storage in various flavors. We invite Gartner to tell users that all these use cases are non primary ones, they will laugh. But it means the vendors and products list is incomplete or they have to change the name and scope of the report. They insist on SDS which is just a flavor and can’t be the defining factor of the category. If it is, ask vendor to deploy their SDS with other hardware and you hit a wall in several cases.

It appears that the report is driven by some vendors and thus Gartner illustrates again its lack of independency and real market and technology understanding.

In the mandatory features paragraph, they clearly indicate that a primary storage must include a block-based STaas, this is just incredible. Same remark for AIOps, again SDS and cyber storage. For sure, they can use and define their category but in that case it has to be a real one, and here this is just wrong.

They added in the common features paragraph that the solution can be multi-protocol and leverages a disaggregated storage – compute architecture. In that case, why did they open their previous restriction in terms of access methods and regarding the second criteria, we invite readers to check if the vendors list offer really a disaggregated approach.

The result is a MQ that is, let say, bizarre and not aligned with the reality. A few remarks and questions can be made:

• When Gartner meet users, do they ask “What are the block storage solutions you use?” or ” What are the primary storage solutions you use?”, this is really different.
• Why all leaders are pure American companies? This is just a visible fact.
• It appears that all other players outside the leading portion come from outside US.
• Why Zadara is listed being a complete different animal? And in that case, other similar players could have been mentioned?
• Why IEIT Systems is still listed and some other absent again?
• We detect 3 back moves: Hitachi, Huawei and Infinidat.
• Dell almost move to Challengers.
• What are the Gartner subscription for all these players, readers must be curious about the annual budget of these players place in that domain
• If SDS is so important, why some vendors without real SDS are placed in the leader portion?
• …

Year after year, Gartner MQ lost their ability to present a real snapshot of the market and continues to provide a wrong product and technology definition. Again a primary storage is not (only) a block storage but very often a block storage is used as primary. IT is just a storage used to support the business then having the primary role and this is independent of the media technology (HDD, SSD…), connectivity (FC, IB, Ethernet), access methods (block, file, S3, HDFS…), residence (on-premises, cloud, etc), subscription model and data nature (structured or non structured data). So Gartner should rename this MQ primary block storage.