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GigaOm’s latest Primary Storage Radar has 10 leaders amongst the 19 suppliers, with Pure Storage and Hitachi Vantara closest to the desirable central point.
This year GigaOm has merged two previous large enterprise and mid-size primary storage radars into a single report, saying: ”This change reflects the market’s reality that dictates solutions must now scale to meet a wide spectrum of enterprise needs without creating artificial product tiers.”
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The 19 vendors are scored in three categories: key features, emerging features, and business criteria. The scores are then given different weights. Key features and business criteria receive the highest weighting and have the most impact on vendor positioning on the Radar graphic. Emerging features receive a lower weighting and have a lower impact on vendor positioning. Here is the Radar graphic;
The closer a supplier is to the central bull’s eye the more complete their offering is adjudged to be. Visually, Pure Storage just edges ahead of Hitachi Vantara in the Leaders’ ring, closely followed by Dell, NetApp, new entrant VAST Data, and HPE.
Hitachi Vantara and HPE are rated as outperformers because of their expected fast development over the next 12 to 18 months, as is WEKA in the Challengers’ ring.
All the suppliers are in the right-hand platform play side of the Radar diagram, with 11 in the lower innovation segment and the rest in the upper maturity segment.
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Analyst Whit Walters comments that “Storage decisions now require attention from senior leadership because these platforms directly impact an organization’s ability to deploy AI applications and recover from cyberattacks.”
He says two trends dominate the vendors’ development priorities. One is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) performance needs for high throughput LLM sequential reads and low latency vector database reads. The second is recovery speed for ransomware attacks.
Hitachi Vantara asserts that “this year’s report takes on outsized importance as AI is not only driving rapid growth in data creation and straining storage systems but also enabling more advanced cyberattacks.” It noted that its VSP One offering “enables clean data recovery in seconds for companies victimized by a ransomware attack.”
Chief Product Officer Octavia Tanase said: “Cyberattacks are a constantly evolving threat. By providing eight nines of availability, coupled with Hitachi’s Cyber Resilience Guarantee, we can offer near-zero data loss and rapid recovery, giving customers greater resilience in their IT operations.”
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Out of curiosity, we tabulated the three category scores for each supplier, and then calculated unweighted totals. This revealed that Pure Storage was top, followed by Dell, Hitachi Vantara, with HPE and NetApp in equal fourth, and then VAST Data followed by Nutanix;
A chart visualizes these rankings;
Hitachi Vantara is making the report available to interested parties and they can request a download here.
Bootnote
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The circular Radar diagram has four quarter-circle segments defined by a feature-vs-platform play horizontal axis and an innovation-vs-maturity vertical axis. Three concentric rings are overlaid on this with the outer one for new entrants, the middle one for challengers and the inner one for leaders. Vendor placements have direction of progress arrows indicating if they are a forward, fast or out-performing mover towards the center of the circle.
