Gartner's Magic Quadrant flashes up pure flash array-pusher prize-plucker. It's Pure Rickety rectangle house Gartner has promoted Pure Storage to the top of the all-flash array pack in its latest Solid-State Array (SSA) Magic Quadrant, and yanked Kaminario into the leaders' quadrant for the first time. Gartner_SSA_MQ_July_2017 Gartner MQ for Solid-stare arrays, July 2017 - click chart to embiggen The first …
Rob from Tegile here.
I completely agree with you ArrZarr
I've had countless discussions with Gartner on this one. We agree that the SSA and GPDA should merge. Let the Critical Capabilities Report sort out where individual arrays fit in various workloads.
Economics will resolve this soon, but hang on to your hat - there are other product segments Gartner reports on that I have to imagine will warrant their own MQ. Think Object Storage, Shared Memory Storage, the list goes on.
Rob
no spinning = applicability for an all flash array.
Dedup and compression only gets you so far with flash drives- for volume, combination of flash, hybrid and massive scalable capacity for warm/cold data is the actual need.
Pure is still a one-stop shop, albeit with novel technology - and an ability to lose money on every deal they do at the shareholder's expense.
Can't remember a magic quadrant that had any basis in reality or at least my own experience of vendors kit. These are mostly a bunch of rubbish. personally i would put EMC in the bottom left, unless ability to execute is the same as sell lots of kit for lots of money to people who believe buying EMC means they won't get fired (any one remember IBM?) and vision means they reuse any old bit of kit lying around that they can give a new name and re-badge and sell to those self same people.
Do you think the small companies in the quadrant like Tegile, Tintri, Pure (when it was small), Kaminario and Nimble pay anywhere near what the BIG boys pay? HPe or Dell, as individuals pay more than all the small players combined.FACT. If it was pay for ratings then why are the big vendors not at the top right far right? I do know Gartner does not use Pure at all in there DC for internal consumption yet they are at the top and have been in there for four years.
Pure has no business being top for either leadership or ability to execute. They have no cloud solutions that dont require someone elses tech. Flash Blade is interesting and when it gets a full set of features it will be compelling in a few niche areas but the cost of supporting and engineering your own proprietary hardware will likely be a huge headwind to profitability. What is their marketshare for flash, 3rd or ?, how is that showing ability to execute? the math does not support that, imo.
Does anyone else agree that a real metric like revenue should be used to determine "ability to execute"?
Correct me if I'm wrong but the proof of your ability to execute is a sale! By this measure, NetApp has a much better ability to execute than Pure.
Completeness of vision also seems arbitrary...It appears to measure the companies ability to market a value proposition rather than technical capabilities. How many storage vendors OS's can you run in AWS,Azure without a VM? Or what about software defined, how many vendors can run in the cloud like i just said and also on white box in addition to an engineered systems and snap and clone between them? Only NetApp can to my knowledge. Pure is great at talking NVMe all over the place and it is pretty sexy and fast but in reality it is just a faster medium. Very soon Netapp will move from #2 in all flash revenue to #2, I wonder if then it will be in the top leader position...I wont hold my breath.
The proof of ability to execute might indeed be a sale, but that is not how Gartner defines it for their MQ. The full report quite clearly articulates what they mean by ability to execute - and revenue is not it.
There are plenty of flash vendors out there that made a sale, but are not executing effectively in the broader market.
If you want to use revenue as a measure of performance in the market, you might like to hop on over to IDC.
Also, there are a number of vendors that have a software storage capability that is not limited to their own hardware. NetApp is not unique in that field.
"Does anyone else agree that a real metric like revenue should be used to determine "ability to execute"?
Correct me if I'm wrong but the proof of your ability to execute is a sale! By this measure, NetApp has a much better ability to execute than Pure."
No. No more than I judge someones ability to drive by the value of their car.
In fact I find it amazing how some of the vendors are still going, and some really growing, when they don't have the multi billion dollar install base, maintenance, leverage, contacts and portfolio of the larger companies. They are executing.
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