Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, … Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, 2H07 Stanley Zaffos, Roger W. Cox, ... • 3PAR has grown its revenue, market

ResearchPublication Date: 12 January 2008 ID Number: G00154727

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Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, 2H07 Stanley Zaffos, Roger W. Cox, Pushan Rinnen

In 2H07, emerging companies continued to drive innovation, while established companies refreshed their offerings and revamped distribution channels to reduce cost and gain share. Changes in market shares highlight the importance of nonproduct selection criteria when choosing storage vendors.

Publication Date: 12 January 2008/ID Number: G00154727 Page 2 of 24

© 2008 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

In 2007, the midrange disk storage market continued to grow faster than the high-end market in terms of revenue, units and terabytes shipped. Many emerging midrange disk storage system vendors went public in 2007, and others continued to grow their revenue. The increasing credibility of midrange disk storage system vendors in the marketplace is a direct consequence of their installed bases and revenue growth, the innovation they bring to the market and the positive customer references they can deliver in competitive bid situations.

The more-established midrange disk storage system vendors focused on creating solutions that solve infrastructure problems rather than enhancing the basic functionality of their midrange disk storage systems. Thus, vendors focused on heterogeneous protocol support, disk-based backup/restore solutions and tight integration with strategically important independent software vendors (ISVs) such as Microsoft (Exchange and SQL), Oracle, SAP and VMware.

Budget constraints and the growing importance of "green computing" have made disk-storage-system-based thin provisioning, quality of service (QOS) and data deduplication (particularly in archiving solutions) "must have" features in next generation midrange disk storage systems. The expectation that new features will dramatically improve the total cost of ownership (TCO) of next-generation disk storage makes it more imperative than ever that users plan on disk storage system service lives of no more than four years

Gartner's Magic Quadrants measure a vendor's current and probable strength in the market by using a combination of product and nonproduct criteria. This makes a vendor's position in the Magic Quadrant an analog of the vendor's ability to continue investing in product development, its service and support capabilities, and its viability.



MAGIC QUADRANT

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, 2H07

Source: Gartner (January 2008)

Market Overview Users without a need for mainframe connectivity can choose from a variety of vendors' midrange disk array offerings. Many of the midrange disk array vendors support multiple block-access protocols, including Fibre Channel (FC) and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) on the same platform. Some vendors also offer integrated Common Internet File System and Network File System file-access protocol options.

Market Definition/Description Gartner defines midrange disk array products as external controller-based redundant array of independent disks (RAID) that meet the following criteria:

• Use a dual controller or cluster architecture.

• Support Unix, Linux, Windows and NetWare environments.

• Offer no mainframe support.

• Have an average selling price of more than $24,999.



Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria The inclusion of a vendor on a Magic Quadrant is determined by the authors, with input from Gartner's analyst research community. It is based on vendor-independent selection criteria and evidence that a vendor is delivering or executing in line with these criteria. Factors that contributed to the inclusion of a vendor in the 2H07 Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays include:

• Market share and revenue data

• Client interest, as measured by the level of client inquiries received on a vendor's products in the midrange disk array market, as well as other client feedback

• Use of unique, unusual or interesting technology

• Capability to sell midrange disk arrays that carry the vendor's brand to end users via its direct sales force or through a reseller partnership sales channel

• A global presence

Vendors can be included for meeting any one or all of these criteria. This research is not region-specific. Vendors offering midrange disk arrays that meet Gartner's requirements for this Magic Quadrant are listed in alphabetical order:

• 3PAR — InServ Storage Servers

• BlueArc — Titan

• Compellent — Storage Center

• DataDirect Networks — Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A)

• Dell — Dell/EMC CLARiiON CX series

• Dot Hill — SANnet II series

• EMC — CLARiiON CX series and Celerra

• EqualLogic — PS Storage

• Fujitsu — Eternus 4000 and Eternus 2000

• Hitachi/Hitachi Data Systems — Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) and Workgroup Modular Storage (WMS)

• HP — StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) series and larger Modular Smart Array (MSA) series

• IBM — SystemStorage DS4000 series and N series

• Intransa — StorStac System

• LeftHand Networks — SAN/iQ

• Network Appliance (NetApp) — FAS series

• Nexsan Technologies — SATABeast and SATABoy



• Pillar Data Systems — Axiom

• SGI — InfiniteStorage

• Sun Microsystems — Sun StorageTek 6000 series

• Teradata — 6000 series

• Xiotech — Magnitude 3D series

LSI Logic is not included in the Magic Quadrant because it does not have a direct sales channel or brand equity in the midrange disk array market. However, its OEM relationships with IBM, SGI, Sun and Teradata explain the commonality of features and functions of these companies' midrange offerings and highlights the importance of nonproduct criteria when positioning vendors in the Magic Quadrant.

The criteria used to evaluate a vendor and position it on the Magic Quadrant are identified and weighted in the Evaluation Criteria section. Magic Quadrants measure the current and probable relative strengths of vendors in the marketplace. They are not a direct measure of a product's attractiveness or a vendor's support capabilities. Therefore, using a Magic Quadrant to ease concerns about a company's long-term financial viability is reasonable; using it as the only justification when selecting a vendor or product is not. It is fine to buy from vendors that are not in the Leaders quadrant. In fact, we frequently recommend including one or more emerging storage vendors on your shortlists to gain access to innovative features and as negotiation leverage with established vendors.

Added LeftHand Networks

Dropped We did not delete any vendor that was included in the 2H06 Midrange Enterprise Disk Array Magic Quadrant, but we did change NCR to Teradata to reflect the spinout of this business unit.

Evaluation Criteria Ability to Execute The criteria weights used for this analysis are unchanged from the 2H06 version of this Magic Quadrant. This highlights the change in vendor positioning directly attributable to vendor actions.

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product/Service high

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization)

high

Sales Execution/Pricing high

Market Responsiveness and Track Record high

Marketing Execution high

Customer Experience high




Operations standard Source: Gartner

Completeness of Vision The weightings for these criteria are unchanged from Gartner's 2H06 Magic Quadrant.

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria


Market Understanding standard

Marketing Strategy high

Sales Strategy high

Offering (Product) Strategy high

Business Model high

Vertical/Industry Strategy standard

Innovation high

Geographic Strategy standard Source: Gartner

Leaders A midrange enterprise disk array storage vendor in the Leaders quadrant has the market share, credibility, and marketing and sales capabilities needed to drive the acceptance of new technologies. It demonstrates understanding of market needs, is an innovator and thought leader, and has well-articulated plans that customers and prospects can use when designing their storage infrastructures and strategies.

Challengers A midrange enterprise disk array storage vendor in the Challengers quadrant has demonstrated the ability to increase revenue and take market share from leaders, but it has limited ability to change the storage market or deliver innovation and backward compatibility over multiple generations of products.

Visionaries A midrange enterprise disk array storage vendor in the Visionaries quadrant delivers uniquely innovative products that address operationally or financially important end-user problems, but has not demonstrated the ability to capture market share or sustainable profitability. Visionary vendors are frequently privately held companies and acquisition targets for larger, established companies. The likelihood of acquisition often reduces the risks associated with installing their systems.

Niche Players A midrange enterprise disk array storage vendor in the Niche Players quadrant focuses on a small market segment and does it well, or is unfocused and underperforms compared with vendors in other market segments. Niche vendors are often smaller companies that do not have the resources or credibility to compete with larger, established vendors, or they are simply new to



the market and, although worth watching, have not yet demonstrated the ability to expand their market share or sustain profitability.

Vendor Strengths and Cautions 3PAR

Strengths

• 3PAR has grown its revenue, market credibility and installed base.

• 3PAR has positioned its InServ Storage Server as an easy-to-use, cost-effective and scalable alternative to high-end enterprise disk storage in many competitive situations.

• InServ Storage Server has TCO advantages relative to high-end storage .

• Compared to traditional high-end enterprise disk storage systems, InServ Storage Server offers competitive scalability, thin provisioning and thin-provisioning-aware replication, a dynamic optimization feature that transparently migrates volumes between high-performance and high-capacity disks and simpler/faster provisioning of application servers.

• InServ Storage Server lowers TCOs relative to high-end storage systems (both operating and capital expenditures) by eliminating the need to pre-provision snapshots and clones and automatically adding upgrade disks to the appropriate pools based on disk type.

Cautions

• It has higher acquisition costs than traditional midrange systems.

• 3PAR has a high-touch sales model and lacks RAID 6 support.

• Justifying the premium price generally charged for InServ Storage Server advantages in scalability and functionality relative to traditional midrange storage systems frequently requires the use of more sales resources.

• Selling the InServ Storage Server against high-end enterprise disk storage systems that promise incrementally superior data availability, relative to less-expensive midrange disk storage systems, frequently requires a lot of sales resources, which is inherently expensive and bottlenecks customer growth.

• Compared with unified storage systems that offer network-attached storage (NAS) and block service functionality, the 3PAR solution lacks the tight integration of these systems, but is certified to work with NetApp and OnStor gateways.

BlueArc

Strengths

• BlueArc has a high-performance unified storage product, called Titan, which has concurrent NAS and iSCSI connectivity.

• Its SiliconServer hardware architecture with field programmable logic arrays overcomes the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus limitation associated with industry-standard servers, resulting in high throughput.



• Its Titan products have added many rich functions throughout the years, such as a scalable file system, volume virtualization, virtual servers, in-system storage tiering with policy-based migration, a write once/read many file system, a global namespace spanning eight nodes and remote replication.

• BlueArc offers modularized upgrades without the need to upgrade the whole controller or to migrate data.

• The vendor had spotty revenue growth records in the past but has shown renewed growth strength in 2007, partially driven by its OEM relationship with HDS, which resells its NAS gateways. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Form S-1 that BlueArc filed prior to an initial public offering, HDS has become a major contributor to BlueArc's revenue.

Cautions

• Because BlueArc's technology doesn't use industry-standard commodity hardware and is geared toward the high-end spectrum of the midrange market, it has mainly relied on its own sales force to penetrate the market. Therefore, its installed base growth has been slow compared with other emerging midrange disk array vendors.

• BlueArc offers iSCSI connectivity; however, it hasn't focused on unified storage messaging and its iSCSI adoption rate is low.

• Except for its brand awareness in a few vertical industries, BlueArc remains relatively unknown in the general storage market.

Compellent

Strengths

• Compellent offers an innovative midrange disk storage system with comprehensive advanced features and easy management. Its Storage Center provides simultaneous FC and iSCSI support, thin provisioning, automated storage tiering with a fine-grained migration policy within a system, and advanced snapshots and replication.

• In 2007, Compellent added a storage area network (SAN) boot for physical and virtual servers, a Windows-based NAS gateway for file services and a price-competitive iSCSI bundle.

• The vendor has a good business model for a small company. Compellent has grown its revenue rapidly by forging strong channel relationships and retaining a high customer retention rate. It proceeded with its initial public offering (IPO) in October 2007 and reported strong revenue growth in its third quarter.

• It has effective marketing and increased market awareness.

Cautions

• Being a newcomer to the midrange disk storage space, Compellent lacks a substantial track record, and its installed based is primarily confined within North America.

• As a small company, Compellent's application partnerships have been limited to a few key ones, including Microsoft, Novell, Symantec and VMware.



DataDirect Networks

Strengths

• DataDirect Networks (DDN) offers a hardware-assisted, highly available, high-performance storage system for both reads and writes with no RAID performance penalty and reduced need for external switching.

• It provides turnkey solutions with scalable shared SAN file systems and cluster file systems to leverage its parallel access to disks and virtual tape library technology.

• In 2007, DDN signed IBM as another OEM partner, in addition to SGI. The S2A appliance is also resold by Bull, Cray, Dell and Sony.

• When DDN launched S2A in 2000, it was focused primarily on the high-performance computing (HPC) arena. Today, HPC accounts for only 40% of DDN's revenue, as the company continues to expand into media and Web services vertical industries by addressing backup and archiving of large digital content, and adding relevant technologies and partners for those areas.

• DDN has achieved good business efficiency and profitability since 2002.

Cautions

• DDN has consciously chosen to focus on growth potential in the Unix/Linux environment for high bandwidth and bulk storage; therefore, the S2A is not positioned as a general-purpose storage product.

• Although DDN has rich partnerships with file system vendors, the company needs to broaden its technology partnerships in other solution areas with vendors such as Microsoft, which is increasing its presence in DDN-targeted markets and the general-purpose storage market.

• DDN also needs to enhance its S2A product with some key horizontal features, such as space-efficient snapshot, thin provisioning and policy-based migration tools for storage tiering.

• Because of the company's relatively narrow focus, DDN's installed base and revenue stream are growing at a slower pace than some emerging midrange disk storage companies.

Dell

Strengths

• Dell's 2007 midrange disk storage consists of its CX series, which is sourced from EMC. The successful OEM relationship was renewed in October 2006 for another five years.

• Dell was the fourth-largest worldwide midrange enterprise disk array vendor in the first half of 2007 and showed strong CX revenue growth in the recent quarters in 2007, partly reflecting Dell's increased efforts in storage qualification and benchmarking for iSCSI-based virtualized server environments.

• Its pending acquisition of EqualLogic will automatically provide Dell with a large iSCSI SAN market share, as well as some midrange storage technologies.



• While continuing its strength of pre-configuring hardware and software at the factory and rapid delivery and services with its wide presence around the globe, Dell has made significant investments in enterprise services by launching its Platinum Plus service package, which has a performance benchmark tool and a real-time tracking system.

Cautions

• The pending acquisition of EqualLogic is a challenge for Dell as it manages new channel partnerships and its current relationship with EMC.

• Dell has historically relied on EMC for its major midrange disk storage product innovation and counted on EMC to produce competitive products in a timely manner.

• Dell has been focusing its own technology innovations and marketing messages on the low end, rather than midrange, of the market, especially direct-attached storage and iSCSI SANs. However, the recently announced acquisition of EqualLogic will enhance Dell's own technology portfolio in the midrange market.

• Although EqualLogic technology provides Dell with mostly an add-on opportunity to its existing Dell/EMC portfolio, it poses a long-term conflict with the CLARiiON CX product Dell resells. There will also be challenges for Dell to bridge its low-end MD3000i iSCSI platform with the midrange EqualLogic iSCSI platform.

Dot Hill

Strengths

• Although Dot Hill continues to realize the majority of its midrange enterprise disk array revenue from its older SANnet II series, it has steadily brought new disk array products to market, which are branded as R/Evolution and based on technology from its 2004 Chaparral Network Storage acquisition. The R/Evolution products feature an innovative mirrored cache implementation that reduces time to write data to cache by 50%, a cost-efficient battery-free power loss backup design that extends protection from hours to years and high-performance RAID 6, which Dot Hill claims has only a 3% to 5% performance impact over RAID 5 on write input/output operations per second.

• Its R/Evolution products are Network Equipment Building Systems Level 3 and MIL-STD-810F-compliant, making them suitable for deployment in rugged telecommunications and military environments.

• Dot Hill's leadership team has an extensive disk array storage background and has been with Dot Hill for 45 years. This experienced executive team, along with its skilled engineering team, is dedicated to offsetting the decline in revenue from Sun by expanding the number of revenue-producing clients.

Cautions

• In their present state, products based on the Dot Hill R/Evolution architecture lack thin provisioning, reservationless snapshot copy, subvolume QOS, and the ability to support block- and file-access host interfaces on a common platform. The omission of these features may increase acquisition, operational and management costs relative to competing solutions supporting these capabilities.

• With R&D expenditures scaled to revenue generation, Dot Hill must prioritize product development and qualification investments to functionality that provides early revenue accretion. Therefore, support for a variety of SAN infrastructure alternatives and



operating environments, such as VMware ESX and Unix variants, are typically extended to match opportunity.

EMC

Strengths

• EMC continues to be the largest midrange disk storage vendor in terms of revenue. Its midrange storage system revenue grew faster than the midrange market in 1H07, even as senior management busied itself with the VMware IPO and acquisitions supporting its strategy of becoming a broad-based information infrastructure company.

• Sales is aggressive, uses the full resources of the company to deliver a positive buying experience and is willing to lower prices when necessary.

• EMC has improved its channel partner relationships. Engineering/development is keeping EMC's midrange disk storage product offerings competitive but not compelling, which is acceptable as long as EMC responds to competitors' product enhancements before a competitor can use its advantage to gain sales momentum or market "mind share."

• Examples of EMC staying close enough to market-leading functionality include CLARiiON CX and Celerra multiple protocol support, and thin provisioning in Celerra.

Cautions

• Depending on Dell's ability to successfully absorb EqualLogic, the acquisition is forecast to adversely affect CLARiiON sales in two ways. First, it will reduce Dell/EMC AX150i and CX iSCSI revenue, and then as 10GE becomes more affordable, EqualLogic will encroach on CLARiiON CX prospects that have not yet invested in FC SAN technology. Second, it will increase the demand for advanced functionality and ease-of-use features that are not available in CLARiiON CX by making EqualLogic channels more effective by eliminating EqualLogic company viability as an issue.

• Despite ongoing investments in Navisphere, the product does not yet have the ease of installation and management that EqualLogic and other emerging storage companies offer.

• Selling a broad range of products with different value propositions can be an advantage in the marketplace but a management challenge for users and a major development expense for EMC.

EqualLogic

Strengths

• EqualLogic was the pure-play iSCSI market leader in 2006 in terms of vendor revenue. It continued to grow fast in 2007, has an installed base of more than 3,500 users and has about 500 active value-added resellers (VARs).

• Its PS Series is among the easiest to install in the industry, and most of its customers install the storage systems themselves. It offers a scale-out, pay-as-you-grow architecture and automatic load balancing among multiple nodes, and its standard pricing includes many features, such as thin provisioning, snapshots, remote replication and automated Multipath I/O management.



• The pending acquisition by Dell will remove company viability issue in customers' minds.

Cautions

• Although EqualLogic has made progress in penetrating large accounts, its success story has been mainly confined to small and midsize environments.

• Productwise, the PS Series doesn't natively support the FC protocol or file access protocols and cannot be leveraged by customers who prefer unified storage.

• Although EqualLogic sells in 30 countries, international revenue contribution remained small at 18% at the end of September 2007.

• Its relatively heavy reliance on its top-10 channel partners (about 40% of its revenue) may be problematic in the future after Dell completes the acquisition, because Dell's historical direct sales model has strained its relationship with the distribution channel.

Fujitsu

Strengths

• From a technology perspective, the Fujitsu Eternus 4000 is a competitive midrange enterprise disk array storage system featuring integrated FC and iSCSI host connectivity, data disk encryption, RAID 6 and massive array of idle disks (MAID) support.

• Fujitsu's regional subsidiary initiatives are backed by a secure, well-financed parent company with a proven engineering heritage that views the midrange enterprise disk array storage market as a long-range revenue growth opportunity.

• Fujitsu can leverage its server installed base. Unlike pure-play midrange enterprise disk array storage vendors, Fujitsu can assemble attractively priced bids that bundle its storage offering with its server, software and service offerings, enhancing its competitive position.

Cautions

• Fujitsu has to prove itself as a trusted supplier of disk storage infrastructure and responsive client support because of its minimal success outside the Japan market. This becomes a larger challenge in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) where Fujitsu must compete against Fujitsu Siemens, a company jointly owned by Fujitsu and Siemens, which sources its midrange enterprise disk arrays from a competing supplier. However, Fujitsu Siemens is also a master reseller for the Eternus product line in EMEA, selling directly to and supporting Fujitsu global customers.

• Lacking thin provisioning and subvolume QOS functionality may result in increased acquisition, and operational and management costs relative to competing solutions with these capabilities.

• The launch of the Eternus midrange enterprise disk array outside Japan is not Fujitsu's first attempt to penetrate this market. In the late 1990s, Fujitsu changed from direct sales of internally developed products in the Americas market to become a third-party reseller for EMC. Fujitsu's re-emergence in the Americas region is backed with direct and channel sales of its internally developed Eternus midrange disk array systems.



Hitachi/Hitachi Data Systems

Strengths

• Hitachi Data Systems' (HDS's) AMS/WMS disk storage systems are functionally competitive against other established vendors' midrange disk storage offerings and have earned a reputation for being reliable. HDS's focus on reliability has also shown itself in the AMS/WMS's early support of RAID 6.

• The sharing of application programming interfaces where there is functional overlap and management tools with HDS's high-end USP storage systems expands ISV support and simplifies system management in environments with AMS and USP installed.

• Hitachi is a large technology company with a rich patent portfolio, a major semiconductor and hard-disk drive presence, demonstrable server, storage, software and support expertise, and the financial resources to take a long-term view in growing markets.

Cautions

• Relative to Hitachi's investments in storage R&D, Hitachi continues to underinvest in HDS marketing and sales.

• With other established disk storage vendors relying ever more heavily on indirect channels as they lower hardware prices and move revenue and margins into software, HDS has no choice but to make itself a more attractive channel partner.

• Recent executive hires and HDS's decision to rely on indirect channels to sell its new entry-level disk storage systems suggest that it is retooling its channel strategy to rely more heavily on indirect channels in the midrange disk storage market. In the Asia/Pacific region (except Japan, where HDS is a market leader), HDS sometimes tests new marketing and sales strategies, and it is here that we are seeing HDS increase its investments in channels and show an increased willingness to compete aggressively on price. Only time will tell whether HDS implements this strategy around the world and whether it achieves a similar level of success.

HP

Strengths

• HP is a portfolio company with a large installed base.

• It has deep financial resources and has demonstrated a willingness to invest in its strategy and make changes as problems arise and business needs dictate.

• HP is a large professional service organization.

• In an effort to grow storage revenue faster than the market and move toward its stated goal of becoming No. 1 in the midrange disk storage market, HP hired Dave Roberson, former president and CEO of HDS, to become the senior vice president and general manager of HP's StorageWorks business unit. Early indications are that HP is following a strategy of creating disk storage solutions built on its MSA and EVA storage systems, rather than trying to technologically leapfrog its competitors.



• HP is hiring and training additional storage specialists, investing in its Storage Elite channel program and encouraging the sales force to take on more risk in competitive situations.

Cautions

• EVA and MSA are aging systems. Compared with emerging storage companies' midrange disk storage systems, EVA loses the "specs wars" against newer rivals. It lacks thin provisioning, QOS features that include back-end disks, RAID 6 and native iSCSI support, has less cache and fewer host connections, and is no longer the undisputed performance leader. However, Command View's ease of use is competitive against other vendors' midrange management tools, and EVA is still good enough to win in most situations.

• EVA's year-over-year revenue growth was 8% in the first three quarters of 2007. During this same time period, MSA's year-over-year revenue declined 7%, despite recent microcode updates that improved performance by making the MSA an active/active controller design rather than the active/standby design of earlier microcode releases. This revenue decline is attributable to many factors, including a lack of controller-based replication facilities, competition, uninspired marketing and sales, and a reluctance to compete aggressively on price.

• It remains to be determined whether the changes HP has made in its leadership will help it regain sales momentum and build a more aggressive culture.

IBM

Strengths

• IBM is a global company.

• It has vertical market expertise.

• IBM is turning its OEM relationship with NetApp into a major success.

• IBM's 1H07 revenue grew 243.1% over 1H06 revenue, and the N series is making it onto an increasing number of client shortlists. Concerns that the N series would cannibalize DS4000 series sales have so far proved unfounded. IBM's DS4000 series revenue is growing, and its OEM relationship with LSI, by all appearances, remains solid.

• It is successfully using its SAN Volume Controller and IBM Global Finance organization to gain functional and operational competitive advantages and to provide favorable bundling and financing.

Cautions

• IBM is a global enterprise that develops messaging and marketing programs that create synergies between various IBM business units, with the objective of globally optimizing current and future IBM revenue. The same strategy is applied to buy/build technology decisions and the allocation of development resources.

• Globally optimizing the allocation of development resources and channel bandwidth among storage, servers, software and professional services is inherently more difficult and time consuming in large portfolio companies than in smaller storage-focused companies. This is a primary reason why IBM has difficulty responding to competitors'



product announcements and changes in tactics, addressing the needs of IBM channel partners and adjusting sales force incentives.

• Although IBM Global Technology Services regularly works with IBM sales teams, committing storage professional services to the entire sales cycle has been issue.

• As part of the Systems and Technology Group, IBM storage competes for development resources. Within this decision-making framework, IBM chose to invest in its SAN Volume Controller, rather than in the DS4000, to provide functionality and migration services unavailable in the DS4000.

• At a strategic level, the combination of the SAN Volume Controller and DS4000 is attractive, but only in situations where the customer or prospect is willing to install in-band virtualization products, and the cost is not prohibitive.

Intransa

Strengths

• Intransa has a scalable architecture. Supporting 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet, Intransa's StorStac N-way clustered architecture and internal Internet Protocol (IP) topology scales performance and capacity independently and nondisruptively to meet changing needs while preserving initial investments.

• Version 4 of Intransa's StorOS software and scalable StorManager software has evolved in feature, function and maturity since it first shipped in 2003.

• The Intransa StorStac storage systems are designed specifically to support network-based applications requiring extreme performance and scalability. Typical application deployments include Microsoft Exchange 2007, video surveillance, video on demand, digital entertainment/post production, medical and document imaging, data warehousing and distance learning. Intransa's StorStac storage systems are certified with Microsoft for a 10 Gbps IP SAN solution supporting 11,000 Exchange 2007 users.

• Video storage, particularly video surveillance, represents Intransa's fastest-growing market.

Cautions

• Since Intransa's 2001 launch as a 3Com spinoff, it has gone through many changes in leadership and strategies, hampering its marketing success. In the fourth quarter of 2006, another new management leadership team with extensive background in storage and networking was put in place. Supported by an additional $10 million in venture capital funding, this seasoned leadership team is attempting to leverage Intransa's innovative architecture into a successful storage business.

• Although the Intransa architecture is scalable in performance and capacity, the host interface and disk drive interface technologies are respectively limited to SCSI protocol over TCP/IP (iSCSI) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) technologies.



LeftHand Networks

Strengths

• LeftHand Networks is an emerging disk storage company that sells its branded Network Storage Module (NSM) iSCSI disk storage system and packages its SAN/iQ software with IBM, HP and Dell industry standard servers to build physical iSCSI storage SANs.

• As an alternative to building physical iSCSI SANs, LeftHand Networks will license its software to run in an ESX virtual machine, enabling customers to build virtual SANs.

• SAN/iQ functionality is the same whether running on a physical server or in a virtual machine. It includes centralized management, snapshots, asynchronous remote copy, thin provisioning and online volume migration. SAN/iQ clusters can include physical and virtual NSMs in a single logical shared storage pool, implement software RAID and support geoclusters.

• LeftHand Networks claims linear performance scalability of SAN/iQ clusters, because they grow from three to 30 nodes and notes that customers have built SAN/iQ clusters of more than 100 nodes.

• Running on Dell, HP or IBM server hardware enables LeftHand Networks customers to take advantage of these companies' hardware support and LeftHand Networks for software support.

Cautions

• The growth of LeftHand Networks' revenue and the iSCSI market have put the vendor on the radar screens of its larger and more established competitors.

• Dell, with its recent acquisition of EqualLogic, is the most obvious strategic threat to LeftHand because it owns competitive technology, has low-cost sales and support models, and has EqualLogic's channel partners if it can keep them and a direct sales model if it cannot keep them.

• LeftHand Networks needs to keep its SAN/iQ competitive and its hardware and software products complementary.

• LeftHand Networks needs to maintain its revenue growth to remain relevant.

• Keeping its channel productive and its installed base loyal as it grows will present major challenges for LeftHand Networks.

Network Appliance

Strengths

• NetApp has evolved into a major storage vendor. It was the third-largest midrange disk storage vendor in terms of worldwide revenue, behind EMC and HP, in the first half of 2007.

• It was the No. 1 leader in the fast-growing IP disk storage market in 2006.

• Besides its rich functions in data protection and data management, NetApp's single-storage platform architecture with unified NAS/SAN storage provides users with more flexibility and easier migration than its major competitors.



• In 2007, NetApp introduced deduplication to its flagship FAS line.

• Its executive management team has been stable throughout the years, and it has demonstrated an overall good track record in revenue growth.

Cautions

• NetApp's success is most pronounced in developed countries. Its brand awareness is still behind the top storage vendors in many developing countries, such as China, Eastern Europe and Latin America, where it also tends to have weak channel partners.

• Although its thin provisioning technology provides an advantage against major competitors, NetApp is facing more technology competition from small, emerging vendors, such as policy-based storage tiering within a system and storage clustering.

• NetApp's next-generation cluster file system development is somewhat behind the original schedule, as adding its current rich features to the cluster file system continues to be a challenging task.

Nexsan Technologies

Strengths

• Nexsan is an early developer of low-cost, high-capacity disk arrays based on ATA disk drive technology and featuring autoMAID capability. This technology has evolved from lower-performing and smaller-capacity parallel ATA disk drives to faster-performing and large-capacity serial ATA disk drives.

• Nexsan's disk array platforms support integrated FC and iSCSI host interfaces, enabling a broader range of deployment opportunities in an end-user's storage infrastructure.

• To expand the applicability of its underlying disk array technology, Nexsan has qualified SATABeast and SATABoy to work with a number of ISVs and independent hardware vendors to develop a menu of platform personalities, including file access and virtual tape functionality.

Cautions

• The Nexsan midrange disk arrays lack snapshot and remote replication functionality. As a result, Nexsan's midrange disk array systems are typically deployed in applications such as disk-to-disk backup, extreme density tiered storage, HPC, digital closed circuit TV applications and, when configured with Nexsan's Assureon product, encrypted online archiving.

• Larger, mainstream vendors are paying increased attention to the markets served by Nexsan as a means to expand their revenue bases.

• At the hardware level, there is increasingly little to differentiate Nexsan's hardware from that provided by the larger, better-positioned disk array vendors.

Pillar Data Systems

Strengths

• Pillar Data Systems has a unified storage architecture that optimizes data flow performance for NAS and SAN services.



• Its Axiom product offers QOS features from protocol queuing to disk layout.

• In 2007, Pillar enhanced some features for Oracle and Microsoft Exchange applications. It also launched a more channel friendly product and increased its channel sales to represent about 70% of its total revenue.

Cautions

• Pillar has built the infrastructure needed to support rapid sales growth and has invested in its professional service business to compete more effectively in high-touch sales situations, resulting in a large expense load that makes rapid revenue growth critical to the company's success.

• Productwise, Pillar has not yet delivered some key midrange features, such as native remote replication, SAN-side thin provisioning and RAID 6.

• As Pillar expands its distribution channels and more vendors compete for the same channel bandwidth, Pillar will have to do more to increase its mind share with more-effective channel partners. Only time will tell whether Pillar can continue to ramp its revenue to be successful in the midrange storage market.

SGI

Strengths

• Scaled to meet its account penetration and revenue growth goals, SGI possesses a well-trained professional service organization that has longevity experience in highly complex IT infrastructure environments.

• SGI is building on its technology innovation heritage to bring software solutions to market that enhance the applicability of its midrange enterprise disk storage systems. Augmented by its internally developed shared file system (CFXS) and data migration facility software, SGI's midrange enterprise disk arrays are well-suited for multiplatform, high-performance data sharing and tiered storage applications.

• Leveraging its server sales activities, SGI has market presence and support in 35 countries. It offers its documentation and customer support for its midrange enterprise disk arrays in eight languages.

Cautions

• Although SGI tends to focus on integrated offerings that include its servers, software, services and midrange enterprise disk storage systems, it has achieved limited success in selling its midrange enterprise disk array storage systems outside its server customer base.

• SGI's midrange enterprise disk storage systems support environments associated with Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris and IBM AIX operating systems; however, SGI's technical competence is stronger in enterprise environments associated with the Linux and IRIX operating systems supporting Oracle database applications.

• SGI's midrange enterprise disk storage products represent solid and reliable technology; however, they lack certain functionality, such as thin provisioning, space-efficient snapshots and remote replication, and support for iSCSI SAN-based storage. These are capabilities that Gartner projects to be competitively essential and differentiating during the next three years.



• Even though SGI is well-recognized as a leading provider of HPC platforms, its disk storage lineage does not enjoy a similar credibility; therefore, clients need to perform rigorous reference checks.

Sun Microsystems

Strengths

• The Sun StorageTek 6540 and 6140 represent competitive midrange enterprise disk array offerings from a performance, capacity scalability and feature/function perspective. Although Sun sources the 6540 and 6140 basic RAID technology and companion controller-based data services software from LSI, it develops the Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software used to configure, monitor and manage these systems internally.

• Sun has an attractive total available market for its midrange enterprise disk arrays. With just a little more than one-third of the market share of the midrange enterprise disk array market associated with the Solaris operating system, Sun can potentially offer competitively priced server, storage, software and service bundles to enhance its penetration of this market that the competition finds to be so lucrative.

• Beyond a competitive product portfolio, Sun has global field sales and support operations assigned to sell and support its storage infrastructure hardware and software products.

Cautions

• Ongoing changes in Sun's storage practice leadership and organization indicate that the integration of the StorageTek acquisition remains a work in progress after more than two years. Only one former StorageTek officer-level executive remains in a high executive leadership role in Sun's current storage practice.

• In August 2007, R&D responsibilities associated with Sun's highly promoted "breakthrough" storage products, based on the Solaris operating system and the ZFS file system, were moved out of the storage practice and into Sun's server organization. In October 2007, Sun merged its separate storage practice organization into a newly created systems organization that is responsible for all server and storage product development. Under this new organizational structure, the group, formally known as Sun's storage practice, is responsible for the disk array products sourced from Dot Hill, HDS and LSI, as well as for all tape and tape automation products, while the development of the new breakthrough disk storage products based on the Solaris operating system and the ZFS file system are managed by different leadership within the new systems group.

• Although Sun's organizational changes may conform to its longer-term disk storage platform development strategy, the changes are disruptive at the contributor level, result in conflicting product positioning and messaging, and contribute to a diminished focus on Sun's midrange enterprise disk array product portfolio — the 6540 and 6140.

• Sun's executive zeal to develop new disk storage products based on its own IP — Solaris and ZFS — casts a cloud over its long-range commitment to the Sun StorageTek 6000 series disk array product offering.

• As Sun continues to rationalize its storage field sales and support organization, Gartner is receiving a few reports from older StorageTek disk array accounts that they are not



receiving the same level of account support from Sun that they were getting from StorageTek and are considering changing vendors.

Teradata

Strengths

• The Teradata 6843 midrange enterprise disk array is sold as a tightly integrated component of the Teradata database solution offering. Teradata, working with LSI Logic, the company from which Teradata sources the 6843, has developed integration code that optimizes performance, availability and manageability in a Teradata data warehouse installation.

• Beyond application competency, Teradata relies on responsive, proactive support for its data warehouse client base. Its practice of configuring storage as part of the installation process eliminates most configuration-related problems.

• With the database software managing data placement in the storage system, Teradata solutions require relatively little storage management attention. The result is that customer complaints about pre- and post-sales support are rare.

Cautions

• Teradata bundles its bids, making it difficult to ascertain the exact pricing of the 6843 midrange enterprise disk array component. However, Gartner research indicates that Teradata charges a 10% to 20% price premium for the 6843 when compared with what an end user would pay for a comparably configured midrange enterprise disk array that is deployed in a general-purpose disk storage infrastructure.

• Sold as a single-purpose solution, the Teradata 6843 midrange enterprise disk array, although easy to manage and modify, is administered outside the framework of an organization's standard storage infrastructure.

• Teradata appears slow to react to the emergence of new high-performance, lower-cost technology, such as the combination of Sun's Sure Fire X4500 data server and Greenplum's data warehouse software.

Xiotech

Strengths

• Xiotech has a scalable clustered storage architecture and vertical industry expertise.

• Xiotech's Magnitude 3D is an easy-to-manage disk storage system that, in most respects, compares favorably with other midrange disk storage offerings. The large percentage of Xiotech customers upgrading to newer Magnitude 3D systems reveals a high degree of customer loyalty.

• Magnitude 3D offers a solid state disk option, which makes it an attractive storage solution for Microsoft Exchange and other applications using files that have modest storage requirements and very high input/output rates, particularly those with high write content because RAID write penalties are eliminated.

• With the acquisition of the Seagate Advanced Storage Architecture group, Xiotech gained key development personnel and ownership of technologies that promise



improvements in performance and power consumption, as well as a two to three order of magnitude improvement in reliability.

Cautions

• Xiotech has limited local and remote copy functionality.

• Xiotech relies more heavily on its direct sales channel than most other midrange disk storage vendors. Profitably gaining market share will require Xiotech to increase its market visibility and grow its VAR channels, ideally with a special emphasis on legal discovery because of its strengths in this vertical market (for example, Corporate Evidence Management System).

• Magnitude 3D's DataScale GeoRAID and GeoReplication software do not provide space-efficient, point-in-time copies, which can make creating frequent point-in-time copies expensive.

• Intelligent Provisioning, which began shipping in October 2007, provides some of the benefits of thin provisioning by nondisruptively adding capacity to Windows 2003 servers, but it does not work with other operating systems, such as Unix and Linux.

RECOMMENDED READING

"Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes: How Gartner Evaluates Vendors Within a Market"

"Emerging Storage Vendors: 3PAR Takes on the Storage Industry Giants"

"Emerging Storage Vendors: Compellent Offers Competitive Alternative to Mainstream Midrange Disk Array Vendors"

"Thin Provisioning Is Revolutionizing Storage Management"

"Comparing RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 6"

"Hype Cycle for Storage Hardware Technologies, 2007"

"RAID Technology: Overview, 1H07 Update"

"The Storage Staffing Metrics Conundrum"

"Technology Overview: Disk Array Storage, 2007 Update"

"Dataquest Insight: Midsize Businesses Cite Plans for Storage Area Networks"

"Best Practices Yield High-Availability Storage Area Networks"

"Market Share: External Controller-Based Disk Storage, Worldwide, 2003-2006"

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

AMS Adaptable Modular Storage

DDN DataDirect Networks

EMEA Europe, the Middle East and Africa

EVA Enterprise Virtual Array



FC Fibre Channel

HDS Hitachi Data Systems

HPC high-performance computing

IPO initial public offering

IP Internet Protocol

iSCSI Internet Small Computer System Interface

ISV independent software vendor

MAID massive array of idle disks

MSA Modular Smart Array

NAS network-attached storage

NSM Network Storage Module

QOS quality of service

RAID redundant array of independent disks

S2A Silicon Storage Appliance

SAN storage area network

SATA Serial Advanced Technology Attachment

TCO total cost of ownership

WMS Workgroup Modular Storage

VAR value-added reseller

Vendors Added or Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills, etc., whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.



Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood of the individual business unit to continue investing in the product, to continue offering the product and to advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor’s capabilities in all pre-sales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, pre-sales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message in order to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional, thought leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements, etc.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the Web site, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling product that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature set as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.



Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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