2024 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms

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This years Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms again only cements the reasons COOLSPIRiT partners with who we do. Having implemented data infrastructure solutions from partners such as HPE and Pure Storage for many years - it's fantastic to see them leading the way. Continue to read extracts from report, followed with a link to the full report where you can read the reported vendor strengths and cautions.

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Primary storage users are embracing platform-native service capabilities for hybrid IT operations. I&O leaders should use this research to plan and execute a modern and resilient storage infrastructure platform for mission-critical applications.

Strategic Planning Assumptions 

By 2027, consumption-based platform SLA guarantees will replace over 50% of product feature requirements in storage selection decisions, up from less than 5% in 2024.

By 2028, consumption-based storage as a service (STaaS) will replace over 33% of enterprise storage capital expenditure (capex), up from less than 15% in 2024.

By 2028, more than two-thirds of critical application primary storage infrastructure will employ cyber liability detection and protection capabilities, up from less than 5% in 2024.

Market Definition/Description

The primary storage platform (PSP) market addresses the need of I&O leaders to operate and support standardised enterprise storage products, along with platform-native service capabilities to support structured data applications. PSP products like primary enterprise storage arrays provide mandatory and common enterprise-class primary storage features and capabilities needed to support the platform. Platform-native services like storage as a service (STaaS) and ransomware protection, with PSP product capabilities, are required to support platform-native services. The PSP market has emerged at the convergence of two major enterprise storage market developments: the evolution of the PSP product market in conjunction with the demand for hybrid, multi-domain platform-native storage services, extending on-premises services to public cloud, edge and colocation environments.

PSP products’ foremost purpose is to support platform-native service capabilities and response time and input/output operations per second (IOPS)-sensitive structured data workloads. The storage operating system is the foundation for innovation and a path to a software-defined storage (SDS) architecture that enables hybrid platform services. SDS software abstracts and repurposes the vendor-owned storage operating system, storage management tools and AIOps capabilities from the vendors’ proprietary hardware platform. This allows for improved flexibility in use with third-party infrastructure across one or more infrastructure domains (e.g., public cloud, edge domain locations).

SDS can operate on industry-standard hardware and hypervisors across different infrastructure domains with equal, and no less, or better capabilities to the vendors’ on-premises external controller-based array functionality. AIOps-enabled SLA-based life cycle management and support outcomes are also offered with tangible and measurable guarantees by using storage-based telemetry tools and automation. Platform-native SLA-based operations and the vendors’ API-centric centralized control plane are used for automated infrastructure management.

Platform-native as-a-service offerings include data and storage management services such as ransomware protection. They also include the syndication and integration of in-house or third-party independent software vendor (ISV) products as part of their managed service offerings. PSP products and platform services are available in traditional capital expenditure (capex), subscription and consumption pay-for-use licensing.

PSP use cases include mission- and business-critical database workloads such as IBM Db2; Microsoft SQL; Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint; Oracle applications, including SAP HANA; payment systems; healthcare systems such as Epic; and in-house-developed transactional applications. Other use cases include application consolidation; support for virtual environments, hosted and/or managed virtual desktop infrastructure environments; support for persistent and protected storage for container environments; and hybrid platform-native IT operations that include or span on-premises, colocation, edge and public cloud infrastructure.

Mandatory Features

The mandatory features of the primary storage with platform services market include support for:

• Block-based STaaS offering available as a managed service or in conjunction with the end-user client as IT self-managed offering.
• AIOps for threshold-based operational monitoring and observability to support proactive actions and infrastructure health. AIOps functionality is integrated with the vendor’s customer support capabilities, including digital analytics tools and problem resolution, capacity management, nondisruptive workload simulation, placement and migration, asset utilization costs optimization, performance optimization, and both full and cross-stack observability and reporting.
• SDS architecture that separates the vendor’s storage hardware from the storage operating software that manages the storage system and adjoining infrastructure. The SDS product supports on-premises storage and is integrated to a minimum of one hyperscale cloud platform server, storage or networking hardware to like or similar functionality and capabilities, as found in its on-premises appliance solution and integrated with vendor AIOps functionality. This allows customers to keep their data in the same vendor operating environment while providing portability between on-premises and adjacent multidomain infrastructure.
• Cyberstorage data resilience and protection capabilities that follows the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) for ransomware Identify, protect, detect, respond and recover capabilities. NIST CSF 2.0 includes additional changes and functions, including a sixth pillar: govern.

Common Features

The common features of the primary storage with platform services market include support for:

• Advanced AIOps real-time event streaming capabilities in support of monitored SLA threshold conditions that require automated, system-level (for example, nonhuman intervention) responses/actions to critical IT operational situations, such as cyberliability resilience, continuous cost optimization and productivity improvements
• Multiprotocol, disaggregated storage-compute architecture that supports online asymmetrical elastic scaling of capacity and compute, independent of each other, with elastic (increase or decrease) linear performance from a small number of compute and storage nodes to hundreds or thousands of storage and/or compute nodes without operational disruption
• Carbon dioxide emissions measurement and reporting capabilities, as measured by total kilograms of CO2 per terabyte (kg CO2/TB)
• Special-purpose or customized NVMe SSD products (captive NVMe SSD) for enhanced performance, endurance, management or other enhanced storage capabilities and data services
• Nondisruptive migration service of data from current array to future array with a 100% data availability guarantee

Magic Quadrant

Continue to read the latest report here.