It’s magic quadrant time again, this time for all flash arrays. You can see the results from the Gartner report in this article from The Register here. I really like the way information is presented in these reports it makes it really easy to get a snapshot of any particular market.
IBM, Pure Storage and EMC are listed as leaders against the standard Gartner magic quadrant measures of completeness of vision and ability to execute. HP are listed under the challenger quadrant, which essentially means their ability to execute is strong but their completeness of vision is below what is required to be classified as a leader.
The three leaders are all the results of acquisitions or from the ground up flash developments. 3Par’s architecture is uniquely able to not only deliver performance with spinning disk but also to be suited to an all flash design due to features such as wide striping and true active active design. This becomes important when you stop looking at flash in isolation and consider data centre strategy in its entirety. If your data centre has the need for a flash, mid and high range array choosing EMC as your vendor you would need to purchase three different products –XtremeIO, VNX and VMAX.
This is I think 3Par’s trump card it can be an all flash array, but one that fits into an overall datacentre model and doesn’t create silos of storage. Again if your datacentre needed an all flash, mid and high range array 3Par would be able to tick all these boxes and with the peer motion feature there would be no silos of storage, data could be dynamically moved between traditional and flash storage as required. Plus I’m always one for keeping things simple and managing one versus three products is always going to be much easier.
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