Gartner magicians mumble, fling bones, scrawl new disk pentacle

Gartner's magicians have thrown their animal bones and precious relics up in the air and discerned a new pattern in the way they landed; general-purpose disk arrays. The magicians have invented a new Magic Quadrant (MQ) and say: Improvements in scalability, availability, performance and functionality of midrange storage …

[Freakyfeet]

I think the Gartner title speaks for itself - they don't consider all-flash-arrays as "General Purpose" and more niche. This contradicts much of their marketing as they say that general purpose markets such as VDI and OLTP are best suited to Flash arrays.

Good to see Gartner see through the marketing hype.

[JimC]

Not much of a quadrant

Since nothing is far from a straight line from bottom left to top R

[Don Jefe]

Re: Not much of a quadrant

Well, that's because it is a marketing quadrant. It has zero value beyond an additional slide for executive power points.

[An0n C0w4rd]

Re: Not much of a quadrant

@Don

Hardly. I've seen competitive situations where purchases are made entirely based on the Gartner MQ positioning.

So while techies question their usefulness and accuracy, their role in purchasing decisions is unfortunately all to real.

[Don Jefe]

Re: Not much of a quadrant

Useful as a sales tool. As I stated. Executives are salespeople too. In fact, that's their primary purpose.

[sjsmoto]

Bah, Gartner

They've always reminded me of Gríma Wormtongue. Ill news is an ill guest.

[Anonymous Coward]

Any 'IT leader' that needs a magic quadrant to understand or justify their decision making simply isn't doing their job.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not much of anything

Two years in the making and they come up with this pin the tail on the donkey effort. The commentary on each of the vendors appears to be just as comprehensive, would love to see the actual scoring,.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay for play

Is this study biased by indirect sponsorship. I'm sure EMC spends a lot at Gartner to learn they are the greatest!

[josh.krischer]

Many users misinterpreting the MQ and using them as product evaluation and procurement help. In reality the MQ are showing more the company performance than product quality. In the past Gartner tried to publish storage evaluation report which was comparing different products and vendor viability. One report was published but it was not continued because of one vendor who argued about almost every criteria (his and other products) which was very time consuming.

BTW, I authored many MQs in the past.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying as a former MQ author, is that the MQ grading really has no bearing on the vendor's technology that it purports to represent. Sounds about right, no wonder Gartner managed to collapse so many market areas into a single MQ and keep a straight face.

[josh.krischer]

To some extend, but it is NOT product evaluation.