Welcome to the Age of Composable Infrastructure Kaminario unveils software-defined, composable storage solutions for the modern datacenter.

September 2018

In this issue

Kaminario is Changing the Way IT Deploys Enterprise-Class Solid State Storage Capability 2

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays1 3

Research from Gartner: Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays 5

Kaminario is Changing the Way IT Deploys Enterprise-Class Solid State Storage Capability

Software Defined meets Solid State Storage

Kaminario has been in the business of delivering all-

flash enterprise-class storage since 2011. Relying on

a unique software-defined architecture, the Kaminario

K2 has been rated among the most capable solid-state

storage platforms by Gartner since 2014. Key to its

differentiation, the ability to scale out for performance

and scale up in capacity has made the Kaminario

K2 one of the leading platforms for building cloud-

scale application infrastructure. With the majority of

Kaminario’s business coming from SaaS, Consumer

Internet, or Cloud Service Providers, the company has

seen, first hand, the evolving requirements for cloud-

scale storage infrastructure.

No Compromises on Technical Capability

Kaminario’s software-defined architecture delivers

true enterprise-class capability in a highly flexible,

extremely cost-efficient storage solution leveraging

100% industry-standard hardware. Ranked a Leader

in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the past two years,

Kaminario’s unique technology solution competes

favorably with traditional storage array solutions. The

Kaminario K2 was ranked the highest for analytics

and high performance computing and within the

top three for all use cases in 2018 Gartner Critical

Capabilities Report.

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Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays1

The Composable Storage Paradigm

Kaminario is committed to the vision of delivering

composable storage solutions that deliver a new level

of flexibility and control to SAN storage infrastructure.

Unlike traditional scale-up or scale-out storage arrays,

Kaminario can scale in any direction. This lets IT

organizations optimize their storage infrastructure for

the specific performance, capacity, and cost-efficiency

needs of their application. This highly flexible software

architecture leverages standard hardware building

blocks that can be easily scaled-up, scaled-out, scaled-

down, or scaled-in as business needs dictate.

Enterprise-class Data Services

While highly differentiated in its delivery model,

Kaminario delivers true enterprise-class data services

demanded by world-class IT organizations. Highly

efficient data reduction, native replication utilities,

1 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays G00338339, Analyst(s): Valdis Filks | John Monroe | Joseph Unsworth | Santhosh Rao,

23 July 2018

Source: Gartner (July 2018)

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robust integration support, and true enterprise-

class availability put Kaminario in the same class of

solutions as traditional storage arrays.

In addition to the rich data services, Kaminario also

delivers the unique ability to support mixed workloads

and deliver consistent low latency for a wide array of

applications such as, real time analytics, transactional

processing and high performance computing.

Advanced Analytics, Management, Automation, and Orchestration

Kaminario’s storage platform is complemented with a

world-class analytics, management, and automation

platform called Clarity. Clarity provides Kaminario

customers with a rich toolset for monitoring, planning,

and automating common storage management tasks.

Kaminario Flex is an orchestration platform that can

dynamically control storage resources delivering true

autonomous datacenter management capabilities.

The Economics and Agility of Software Defined Storage

Kaminario delivers its software-defined solution as

either a pre-integrated appliance or as a usage-based

software model. In either case, fully integrated

solutions are available, on-demand, through a strategic

alliance with Tech Data (NYSE: TECD), a Fortune 100,

global IT distributor. The combination of world-class

software-defined storage with best of breed hardware

infrastructure distribution delivers the economics and

flexibility that only hyperscale datacenters achieve.

As cloud-scale operators strive to emulate the

software-defined datacenter efficiencies of the public

cloud, Kaminario is the ideal partner for building

highly flexible, highly cost efficient software-defined

storage infrastructure.

Source: Kaminario

Research from Gartner:

Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays

Solid-state arrays have become faster, smaller and

more reliable, and they’re a safe business decision,

due to guarantees that can’t be obtained in other

areas of infrastructure. Here, Gartner analyzes 18

SSA product families across high-impact use cases

for infrastructure and operations leaders.

Key Findings

■ Solid-state arrays are highly secure and are

insulated from Spectre and Meltdown security

exposures, because arrays do not allow

application code or user code access to the

storage software.

■ High-performance, nonvolatile memory

express, Peripheral Component Interconnect

Express solid-state drive use in solid-state

arrays is increasing; however external NVMe

over Fabric host connections are rarely used,

and often only with proprietary NVMe-oF

implementations.

■ To improve density and performance and

create integrated software stack advantages,

vendors are designing and offering their own

flash modules, rather than using only standard

SSDs.

■ Many vendors are quoting prices for SSAs by

effective or expected capacity, rather than raw

capacity.

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Recommendations

Infrastructure and operations leaders focused on

building and sustaining dependable infrastructure

should:

■ Use SSAs to reduce the fault domain of an outage

or security exposure and improve the level of

security in their data centers.

■ Request that the offer contain the raw capacity and

use the raw capacity to compare offers at a price

per raw terabyte, when purchasing or comparing

the price of SSAs

■ Request guarantees that keep financial

comparisons valid with no cost remedies for

any claims of effective storage array capacity,

performance or any other promise. This is because

effective capacity and performance is workload-

and data-dependent and can be variable.

■ Select SSAs when a project, service, application

or infrastructure requires low latency, consistent

performance, high availability and a small

environmental footprint. SSAs offer transparency

and guarantees that can’t be obtained from other

storage, hyperconverged, integrated or server

solutions.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

In 2022, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning

will represent more than 25% of solid-state array

(SSA) workloads, which is an increase from fewer than

5% in 2018.

By 2020, 30% of SSAs will be based on nonvolatile

memory express (NVMe) technology, which is an

increase from fewer than 5% in 2017.

What You Need to Know

Customer satisfaction with SSAs is high. Nevertheless,

SSAs are still improving in performance, automation

and predictive/preemptive support. Performance

improvements are due to the increased adoption

of the NVMe protocols used by internal SSDs and

backplanes. This is slowly expanding to front-end

NVMe-oF, which uses Fibre Channel NVMe (FC-

NVMe) or high-speed Ethernet host/storage network

connections. This, in turn, is causing transformation

changes in the storage market, because the

performance differences between internal or external

storage have narrowed enough to allow external

storage to be used as slow memory.

The sophistication of array software that integrates

with applications, public cloud services and

hypervisors causes high levels of storage automation

as long as APIs are developed, published and

supported by all parties. This simplifies array

administration storage provisioning via APIs

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and patching. Service outages and preemptive

maintenance and support tasks are reduced, due

to end-to-end application to array AI and machine

learning analytics used to monitor, predict problems

and suggest configuration changes or patches before

a problem occurs. The overall advantages of storage

disaggregation do not tie into upgrades or expansions

to servers and the obvious security benefits of storage

arrays. Customers can select SSAs to create an agile

and flexible IT infrastructure. This can be isolated

from server issues, reliably used, and nondisruptively

upgraded and expanded for several years.

This research analyzes which products are poised

for scalable performance and capacity, coupled with

a smooth transition to NVMe technology, to achieve

sustained, predictable performance. Manageability

and interoperability from the core to the cloud to the

edge, with predictive/prescriptive performance, cost

and issue resolution define the characteristics of

leading solid-state drive (SSD) products.

I&O leaders who need to have a secure, fast, reliable

and flexible storage infrastructure can use this

research to select an SSA that best meets their

needs. The SSAs analyzed in this research are diverse

— scale-up, scale-out, scale-in. Some are purpose-

built, and some are evolutions from previous disk

array designs. Nevertheless, the market offers many

more products from SSA vendors that have not

been included in this research. All of the SSAs in

this research have received overall scores above 3.0,

which signifies that they meet or exceed all of the

requirements required of an SSA.

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Figure 1. Vendors’ Product Scores for the Online Transaction-Processing Use Case

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

Analysis

Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics

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Figure 2. Vendors’ Product Scores for the Server Virtualization Use Case

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

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Figure 3. Vendors’ Product Scores for the High-Performance Computing Use Case

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

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Figure 4. Vendors’ Product Scores for the Analytics Use Case

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

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Figure 5. Vendors’ Product Scores for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Use Case

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

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Vendors

Dell EMC Unity All-Flash

This series of arrays had a hardware upgrade in May

2017. The new Unity-F model numbers are the Unity-F

350/450/550 and 650. In addition, a significant

software update, v.4.3, became available for the

Unity All-Flash family in December 2017 which added

deduplication functionality. Overall, the December

2017 software update, plus additional loyalty

programs, improved the product’s competitiveness

in the marketplace. The Unity All-Flash systems are

unified arrays that support block and file protocols.

The maximum raw capacity of Unity All-Flash series

has nearly doubled, with raw capacity scalability from

1.1TB to 16PB.

All Unity All-Flash models now offer selectable

deduplication, in addition to the existing data

compression functionality for block and file data.

The effective capacity has increased significantly.

Synchronous replication is available only for

block storage, and file-based volumes or storage

in the Unity All-Flash can only be replicated with

asynchronous replication. It requires only 2U of

rack space, when configured with 100TB of raw

storage capacity. Even though the Unity All-Flash has

traditionally been positioned as a midrange array, the

Unity-All-Flash scales to a high maximum capacity of

16PB. This is higher than the traditionally positioned

high-end Dell VMAX All-Flash, which scales to only

4PB of raw capacity.

Because the Unity All-Flash is a dual-controller array,

and the VMAX All-Flash F is a multinode/scale-out

array, the practical usage of a Unity All-Flash F to be

used and configured as a 16PB system is expected to

be rare. Nevertheless, this is the case for most SSAs

that have maximum raw capacity specifications of

more than 5PB, and the Unity All-Flash is successfully

used in high-end environments for high-availability

applications and workloads. Another recent upgrade

and competitive feature that’s available with the Unity

All-Flash is the CloudIQ option. This is the predictive

support offering, which exploits analytics to produce

service recommendations and warnings for the array.

Traditional fault and exception monitoring is also

included with CloudIQ, when enabled and used

with the Unity All-Flash models. The Unity All-Flash

software is available in a software-defined storage

(SDS) option that enables customers to make servers

or virtual machines (VMs) appear as storage arrays.

This provides flexibility and options to customers in

ways that the Unity All-Flash storage features can

be implemented and exploited. All of the software

features of Unity All-Flash are included in the base

price of the array. There are no bundles or extra

software options. Similar to the Dell VMAX All-Flash

arrays, the same guarantees, remedies and “pay as

you go” offerings (e.g., Flex on Demand) are provided

for the Unity All-Flash. These are part of the “Future-

Proof Storage Loyalty” program, which covers 4:1

storage efficiency guarantees, as well as trade-in and

migration offers.

Dell EMC VMAX All-Flash

The VMAX All-Flash has an extensive and proven set

of enterprise features (excluding deduplication).

Therefore, Dell leads with VMAX All-Flash arrays in

high-performance, high-availability data centers. Dell

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has also used the VMAX All-Flash to move its storage

array sales to flash from disk arrays, because most

customers purchase more VMAX All-Flash arrays than

disk-based VMAX arrays. The models in the VMAX All-

Flash family have not changed significantly since the

last upgrade in 2017, and the series consists of the

VMAX 250F, 450F, 850F and 950F, which range from

15TB to 4.4PB. The system is built from individual

V-bricks, which are analogous to nodes or controllers.

The V-bricks contain a controller, cache and storage

and can be upgraded in 13TB increments. However,

for flexibility in the VMAX All Flash, different SSD

capacities can be mixed and matched. Compression

is also flexible: It can be enabled or disabled at the

volume group level.

Significant new VMAX All-Flash features in 2017 were

Recoverpoint support, which enables heterogeneous

replication among any other storage arrays that

support or connect to Recoverpoint. Secure snapshots

protect from malicious or accidental deletion. The

VMAX All-Flash is still a physically large system and

requires more rack space than many competitors’

products. For example, a 100TB raw capacity VMAX

All Flash requires 10U of rack space, compared with

many other vendors’ offerings, which require only

2U of rack space to provide the same raw storage

capacity. Power and cooling requirements are also

relatively higher for the VMAX All-Flash.

Dell has the “Future-Proof Storage Loyalty” program,

which covers a 4:1 storage efficiency guarantee, trade-

in, migration and all-in one software pricing bundles.

Customers that don’t want to buy an SSA and prefer

flexible consumption can use this program’s pay-

as-you-go, “Flex on Demand” monthly operational

payment method as part of the Dell “Data Centre

Utility” program. The software for this is packaged

in two bundles (F” and FX), which are included in the

initial array purchase. However, individual features can

still be purchased separately.

A new version of the VMAX All-Flash SSA, the

PowerMax, became available on 7 May 2018. This

offers new features, such as deduplication, faster

internal NVMe connections and the ability to use

storage class memory; however, it was not included,

because it has only recently become available.

Fujitsu Storage Eternus AF Series

The Fujitsu AF250 S2 and AF650 S2 series of SSAs

were updated in January 2018, This was mainly a

performance improvement, with a larger controller

cache, faster controllers, and faster and more efficient

32Gbps FC connections. The S2 series replaced the S1

arrays (which are no longer available); however, backward

compatibility between the S2 and S1 generations is

maintained for the administration graphical user interface

(GUI), replication and clustering. Compatibility between

the generations enables simple storage migrations from

the S1 to the S2; however, data-in-place controller or

array upgrades from the S1 to the S2 can’t be done.

However, capacity upgrade flexibility is good, because the

size of the SSDs in the arrays can be mixed, as required

by the customer.

Overall, the Eternus S2 arrays have competitive

scalability with the maximum raw capacity of the

AF650 S2 being 2.9PB. The S2 series continues to

be one of the most fully featured SSAs, because

the S2 models offer all of the standard and latest

array features with a great degree of flexibility. In-

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line compression and data reduction are mature

and have been available for more than 18 months.

These data reduction features can be selectively

enabled or disabled on a per-volume basis, as per

workload requirements. Similarly quality of service

(QoS) provides performance control at the logical

unit number (LUN)/volume level, so that different

applications with different service levels can be

consolidated in the array.

All of the array software features are available in

an all-inclusive offer in which the software features

are included in the base price or the array. High

availability can be achieved with the Eternus clustering

feature. Current S2 models do not offer a NVMe back

end or a NVMe-oF front end, nor do they support

integration with Amazon, Azure or Google storage

cloud interfaces.

Hitachi VSP F Series

Hitachi VSP F series consists of four products (F400,

F600, F800 and F1500) that address a broad range

of performance and scalability requirements. Vantara

develops its own flash modules (FMDs), based on

NAND flash components sourced from multiple NAND

vendors. In 2017, Hitachi Vantara introduced support

for SSDs, in addition to FMDs, thus offering greater

architecture flexibility. The VSP platform does not

support NVMe SSDs. All platforms continue to operate

with an internal SAS interface. Software capabilities

are delivered through its time-tested flagship OS,

Hitachi SVOS. The Hitachi SVOS offers all major data

services, such as snapshots, cloning, synchronous and

asynchronous replication, as well as metro clustering.

SVOS 7.0 and later support selective compression and

deduplication; however, this may cause a performance

overhead on the system. This can be avoided by

leveraging the FMD-based, hardware-assisted

compression feature offered by the array.

Hitachi Vantara VSP F series offers a data reduction

guarantee of 2:1 on its arrays and a 100% uptime

guarantee. Enterprises can use VSP’s native cloud

tiering capabilities by creating policies to move

aging data to Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3

or Microsoft Azure. The VSP platform supports

all major hypervisors, OSs, backup software and

cloud management platforms (CMPs). Hitachi

also provides a storage plug-in for containers that

provides persistent storage for Mesophere DC/OS

and Docker containers, as well as data services, such

as snapshots, cloning, replication and monitoring.

It provides a comprehensive list of APIs that

integrate with CMPs, such OpenStack, VMware and

ServiceNow. Hitachi offers two forms of — Foundation

and Advanced — with the latter including remote

replication, advanced management and active-active

support. The Foundation package is bundled with all

VSP F series. Additional software can be purchased a

la carte or as part of the Advanced package.

Overall Hitachi Vantara’s strategy for the VSP F arrays

is conservative and practical, with a 2:1 data reduction

estimate and NVMe support when the protocol

and devices become more mature. However, a new

refreshed series (not analyzed here), VSP F350, F370,

F700 and F900, became generally available in May

2018. It also included a new version of SVOS, called

SVOS RF, which updated array memory management

and solid-state performance.

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HPE 3PAR StoreServ All-Flash Arrays

The HPE 3PAR StoreServ portfolio has an extensive

range of products, starting with its entry-level 8200

series. It progresses higher with more compute

resources and memory with the 9450, which became

available in June 2017 and extends to the 20000

series. This portfolio provides capacities ranging from

2.4TB to 8PB of raw capacity. Given its architecture,

the product is able to efficiently use cost-effective

standard SSDs to drive an aggressive overall system

price that can also be purchased via a consumption-

based pricing model. Well-established, thin-

provisioning capabilities complement selective thin

deduplication, which proceeds after the initial zero-

block, bit-pattern detection. The compression uses

an Express Scan method that identifies redundant

or incompressible data and avoids wasting compute

resources. HPE’s Get Thinner Guarantee promises a

minimum of 75% data reduction ratio, compared with

fully provisioned volume, without storage efficiency

features.

HPE integrated InfoSight capabilities into

the StoreServ portfolio in 2018, although the

recommendation engine is forthcoming. Infosight is a

premier predictive analytics platform that provides AI-

driven management for proactive issue resolution with

visibility beyond storage into the infrastructure and

application layer. HPE 3PAR StoreServ has extensive

ecosystem support that now includes cloud integration

via HPE Cloud Bank Storage. This feature leverages

deduplication and compression to provide efficient

import/export of data interoperable with AWS and

Azure cloud, as well as private clouds.

A common management interface, improved QoS

features and granular performance and health

monitoring are simple to use. 3PAR high availability

is comprehensive with HPE Persistent Cache,

Persistent Port, Peer Persistent, and Asynchronous

and Synchronous Remote Copy features. This is

supported by a high-availability guarantee of six

nines (99.9999%) and a 12-month availability

guarantee. However, to qualify for these reliability/

high-availability guarantees, customers must have at

least four nodes and a more-expensive, mission-critical

support contract. HPE offers investment protection

with its ability to nondisruptively migrate to NVMe

PCIe technology, support for storage class memory

(e.g., 3D XPoint), and a three-year technology refresh

extension business program.

HPE Nimble Storage All-Flash Series

The Nimble Storage AF series from HPE remains

an easy-to-use array predicated on its predictive

analytics for automation and cost-effective use of

flash technology. The AF Series leverages the common

architecture NimbleOS (aka Cache Accelerated

Sequential Layout [CASL]) file system, with its hybrid

arrays that resonate with users for their simplicity

and competitive pricing. The same Nimble OS

administrative GUI is used to manage solid-state and

hybrid Nimble offerings, which can also interoperate

and replicate data between each other. The product

is available as a single array or scaled-out/federated

cluster. The product provides data access via block

storage protocols, such as FC and iSCSI but does not

have file protocols. The CASL file system allows the

use of cost-effective, consumer-grade SSD technology.

Its scale remains the same as in 2017, ranging from

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5.7TB to 553TB in a single array and from 23TB to

2.2PB in a four-array cluster. This is supported by

selectable in-line deduplication and compression in

NimbleOS software that further enhances the array’s

effective capacity.

Its leading differentiating feature is InfoSight Predictive

Analytics. This remote monitoring and support tool

leverages AI to provide proactive problem management

and resolution, such as performance problems caused

by misconfigurations. The monitoring and diagnostics

are based on extensive telemetry data that is analyzed

to resolve and anticipate upcoming issues beyond

storage and across the hardware infrastructure and

application layer. This supports automation of Level 1

and Level 2 support issues, providing simpler planning

and greater manageability for users. The AF series can

integrate with cloud environments through its Cloud

Volumes feature.

Infosight also provides visibility into cloud

environments and proactive recommendations for

users to help optimize on- and off-premises storage.

Customer-friendly business programs on performance,

maintenance extensions, and future-proofed for

next-generation technologies (including NVMe PCIe

and storage-class memory) support high customer

satisfaction levels.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 Series

OceanStor Dorado V3 became generally available

in March 2017 and comprises of Dorado 5000 V3

and OceanStor Dorado 6000 V3. The Dorado V3

is Huawei’s flagship flash array and is positioned

for mission-critical, ultralow-latency, block-based

workloads. Huawei manufactures its own SSDs and

sources its NAND from multiple suppliers, thus

enabling flexibility in array design at aggressive

price points. The Dorado V3 series can scale out to

16 controllers and as much as 36.8PB in capacity,

making it one of the largest scale-out block storage

systems available. The 100GBe and 32Gb FC

interfaces are offered as part of the array, thus

facilitating faster throughput from the host to the

array. The Dorado 5000V3 is also offered with an

internal NVMe SSD-based configuration. However,

migration to this platform must be performed using

a Huawei-provided migration tool or by engaging

professional services, because the platform can’t be

added to an existing Dorado cluster.

The Dorado platform offers in-line compression and

deduplication, along with other data services, such as

cloning, snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous

replication. File services are not supported by the

Dorado V3. The platform also features ebackup, a tool

that provides backup and recovery integration with

AWS S3 and Huawei Cloud. Huawei offers a workload-

specific data reduction guarantee program ranging

from 1.6:1 for databases to 5:1 for VDI workloads.

Dorado V3 also features eService, a cloud-based

analytics platform for performance and capacity

management. All data services, including replication,

are included in the base software license, thus

simplifying the buying cycle.

Huawei OceanStor F V5 Series

OceanStor F V5 series is a unified storage platform,

positioned primarily for use cases such as file sharing

and analytics. OceanStor F V5 is offered in four

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variants (18000F V5, 6000F V5, 5000F V5 and 2000F

V5) that address a wide range of scalability and

performance requirements. All four systems support

SAS-based SSDs ranging from 600GB to 15.36 TB TLC

or MLC SSDs. However, NVMe SSDs are not supported.

The OceanStor F V5 series provides all essential

data services, including in-line compression, in-line

deduplication, snapshots, cloning, integrated backup,

QoS and storage migration. However, each of these

licenses is priced separately, thus complicating the

buying experience.

QoS can be configured at the port level, as well as at

the CPU level, providing better control over application

performance. Along with secure multitenancy

capabilities, QoS makes the OceanStor F V5 series

an attractive solution for service provider and shared

services environments, particularly with large file

storage requirements. Data reduction technologies,

such as compression and deduplication, can be

disabled or enabled at the LUN level. The platform

supports a broad range of backup software, OSs and

hypervisors, as well as CMPs; however, it does not

support Docker plug-ins. The array provides native

integration with the AWS S3 and Swift-based object

storage platforms, for backup and archiving.

IBM FlashSystem A9000 Series

IBM FlashSystem A9000 Series consists of two

models: FlashSystem A9000 and FlashSystem

A9000R, which is the rack version. FlashSystem

A9000 has seen considerable improvements in its

capacity and sizable reduction in its power and

cooling with the evolution of the 900 just a bunch

of flash (JBOF). IBM’s hardware is predicated on its

own flash module technology, which it has developed

internally. The capacity improvement came through

use of advanced flash technology and is optimized to

enhance performance and increase reliability, while

using less-expensive, consumer-grade flash technology.

The A9000 has a maximum raw capacity of 258TB,

and FlashSystem A9000R can achieve 1032TB across

a fully populated rack, with six enclosures.

FlashSystem A9000 includes IBM Hyper-Scale

Manager and Hyper-Scale Mobility software, which

enables the central management and data mobility

across 144 individual A9000 storage systems. The

system has compression and deduplication, with

guarantees based on IBM providing an initial analysis

via workload diagnosis. FlashSystem A9000 is used by

customers as a low-latency SSA for high-performance

applications on single servers. However, it has support

and can be used as shared storage area network (SAN)

high-performance storage. Conversely, FlashSystem

A9000R is positioned for big data and analytics. Given

its high performance and reliability, this product

features robust security that now includes Software

Configuration and Library Manager (SKLM).

The FlashSystem A9000 architecture inherits its

software from the XIV, and its GUI continues to

improve for simpler administration and greater

granularity of storage capacity and performance

monitoring. The FlashSystem also has cloud

integration when using IBM software-defined Spectrum

Accelerate and Virtualize for IBM cloud environments.

This also requires IBM Spectrum connect, which is free

for IBM customers; however, Accelerate and Virtualize

come at additional cost.

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IBM Storwize All-Flash Series

IBM’s Storwize series of SSAs consists of Storwize

V5030F and V7000F. Both became generally available

in September 2016, and the systems can scale up

to larger capacities than the A9000. The V-series

is positioned primarily for virtualized storage

infrastructure consisting of general-purpose database

workloads and back-office environments. Unlike

the A9000 FlashSystem products, these offerings

use industry-standard SSD technology to achieve a

maximum of 11.6PB of raw capacity. In addition,

Storwize series can be clustered to reach its maximum

architecture capacity limit of 32PB. Based on the

application data, the system detects the suitability

for data reduction, allowing it to be flexible to the

LUN level. In-line compression is available and in-line

deduplication became generally available on 8 May

2018 and, thus, has yet to be field-validated. IBM

guarantees a base 2:1 compression savings ratio for

the Storwize series. However, if customers use IBM’s

“Comprestimator” tool, which results in an estimated

5:1 compression ratio, then IBM will guarantee this

extra saving. However, it remains to be seen whether

this program will be enhanced, now that deduplication

is available.

The Storwize series has strong ecosystem support,

extensive API integration and support for hypervisors

and the main data protection vendors. Through IBM’s

software-defined offering, Spectrum Virtualize, users

can have cloud integration. For backup and archiving

to the cloud, IBM offers Transparent Cloud Tiering

that provides snapshots to AWS S3 or OpenStack

Swift Object Storage. This support extends to IBM

Cloud and AWS, or private clouds implementing

compatible on-premises solutions with other public

cloud integration planned. The Storwize series offers

synchronous and asynchronous replication and

Hyperswap capabilities for high-availability, active-

to-active requirements. The Storwize arrays provides

AES/XTS 256 encryption for data at rest.

Kaminario K2

The sixth-generation Kaminario K2 family, announced

and available in February 2017, was augmented with

the new K2.N NVMe-based series. This was announced

during the fourth quarter of 2017, but became

available in May 2018. Both product families feature

FC, iSCSI and NVMe-oF host connectivity and reinforce

an excellent track record of flexible product innovation.

Customers who own prior-generation K2 arrays can

mix and match these with new sixth-generation

K2 nodes, enabling simple product migration and

investment protection. Kaminario has enhanced

its software offerings, with its VisionOS storage

management suite which is now complemented

with Flex (automation and orchestration) and Clarity

(analytics and machine learning). The company

continues to offer “Assured Capacity, Availability,

Performance, Scale, Maintenance and SSD Life”

programs (Kaminario ForeSight).

Combined, the new products provide a base for

diversely “composable” storage, with proven scale

up and scale out capabilities from 7.4TB to 4PB,

managed by a simple GUI that is intuitive and easy

to use, even by nonstorage administrators. The

sixth-generation K2 and K2.N also have the latest

high-speed external interconnects: 32 Gbps FC and

25/50/100GbE. Deduplication is selectable, but

20

compression cannot be disabled. The K2 supports

asynchronous replication; however, synchronous

replication is not available. System security is good,

with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption

at the SSD level and key management.

NetApp AFF A-Series

The NetApp AFF A-Series product line consists of

five products A200, A300, A700, A700s and A800.

In 2017, NetApp continued to make incremental

investments to its product portfolio and introduced

several new features and enhancements through its

latest update to its OS: ONTAP 9.3 is the current

version. ONTAP now offers deeper integration with

the cloud. The FabricPool feature can natively tier to

AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, or NetApp StorageGRID.

CloudSync facilitates file synchronization between

on-premises NFS servers to AWS S3. ONTAP Cloud

helps manage storage entities within AWS, Azure,

Google and IBM Cloud with strong integration with

on-premises NetApp AFF instances. This is particularly

useful for use cases, such as disaster recovery and

application migration to and from the cloud.

NetApp has further built on its central systems

monitoring platform AutoSupport, by introducing

ActiveIQ. ActiveIQ is used for configuration issues,

capacity management and performance optimization.

In May 2018, NetApp released and is now shipping

the AFF A800, the vendors first end-to-end, NVMe-

based SSA that connects internal SSDs via NVMe. The

AFF A800 is a dual-controller system that supports

as many as 48 internal NVMe drives. The AFF A800

supports NVMe/FC and 32Gb FC fabric, as well as

100Gb Ethernet connections. NetApp also released

the next version of its OS, ONTAP 9.4 for all AFF

systems. Highlights include support for NVMe/FC

for AFF A800, A700, A700s and A300, cloud tiering,

SMB multichannel, as well as the introduction of new

REST APIs. The AFF A800 can be added to an existing

NetApp Cluster, thus facilitating seamless migration

of data from existing systems to the new NVMe-based

AFF A800.

NetApp also introduced workload-specific data

reduction guarantees that ensures as much as 7:1

data reduction for certain workloads. The AFF Series

integrates with a broad range of backup software,

CMPs, public clouds and hypervisors, including

containers. The AFF Series has quickly been able to

offer and support large-size SSD configurations up

to 30TBs that reduce rack footprint significantly;

however, compared with smaller-capacity SSDs, these

are known to increase RAID rebuild times.

NetApp SF Series

NetApp has continued to enhance its SolidFire product

line and integrated it with its existing ONTAP-based

AFF Series and management software. The scale-out

array is built using industry-standard hardware, it can

scale to 100 nodes; however, a minimum of four are

required. SolidFire’s Element OS software delivers the

required data services and administration capabilities.

The stand-alone Element storage software layer is

also used in NetApp HCI solutions to provide the SDS

storage services, scale and high availability. SolidFire

systems are positioned for DevOps, private cloud and

service provider environments that can start small and

scale out over time.

21

Four SolidFire models in the portfolio — SF4805,

SF9605, SF19210 and SF38410 —can be mixed

and matched, and they can also be used with older

models. SolidFire has, to date, offered good investment

protection and backward compatibility. The SF38410

was announced in 2017. It is available with 3.84TB

SSDs and can scale to 38.4TB raw capacity per node.

All products provide SSDs that are based on SATA/SAS

interface and do not support NVMe. Workload-specific

storage efficiency guarantee programs ensure further

reduction in net storage footprint ranging from 1.3:1

to 7.2:1. SolidFire systems support a broad range of

hypervisors and containers, including Docker, as well

as integrating with the snapshot capabilities of leading

backup software vendors.

SolidFire systems also offer native backup to S3 or

Swift-compatible object storage platforms. Unlike

traditional RAID implementations, SolidFire implements

a proprietary data protection algorithm called Helix,

which spreads data evenly across all nodes of the

cluster. This increases high availability, reduces

rebuild time significantly and spreads the load evenly

across the cluster during the rebuild activity. SolidFire

supports synchronous, asynchronous and snapshot-

based replication. All software and hardware are

bundled, and systems are sold on a per node basis.

Pure Storage M and X Series

The Pure Storage M and X families of SSAs share

the same controller software and administration

software. The Pure Storage//M series has been

available since 2015, with controller, software and SSD

enhancements during 2017. However, in April 2017,

a newer FlashArray//X70 array became available.

The FlashArray//M scales to 512TB raw and the

FlashArray//X series scales to 878TB raw. The main

difference between the M and X models is that the

X series has faster internal NVMe connections and

also uses the DirectFlash storage modules, instead

of standard SSDs. The DirectFlash storage modules

are designed by Pure Storage, and they enable Pure

Storage to control the format, capacity, performance,

density and software in the storage media layer. The

DirectFlash modules range from 2.2TB to 18.3TB, and

the DirectFlash software has increased integration

with the Purity Operating Environment, which offloads

traditional, SSD-based software functions, such as

garbage collection, encryption and error correction.

The FlashArray//X series will replace the

FlashArray//M series overtime, but backward

compatibility and simple “nonforklift” migrations

from the //M-series to the //X-series are available.

Customers with the //M-series can do a nondisruptive

//M-series controller upgrade to the //X-series

controllers, which effectively makes an existing

//M-series a new //X-series.

Pure Storage continues to offer an all-inclusive,

array-based storage software licensing model, plus

performance, availability and effective capacity

guarantees. To provide customer investment protection

there are also support, maintenance, upgrade and

NVMe-ready offerings via the “Evergreen” subscription

services. New, on-premises, pay-as-you-go services,

such as storage-as-a-service via the Pure Storage

Evergreen Storage Service (ES2), are now available in

the U.S.; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA);

and the Asia/Pacific (APAC) region. This enables

customers to pay for their own private data center

solid-state storage via monthly operational charges.

22

However, customers are charged for the effective

storage capacity usage, not the raw capacity they

use. Customer satisfaction with Pure Storage arrays

is high. High availability, plus fast application failover,

can be provided via synchronous replication and

active-active stretched clusters. External NVMe-oF and

FC-NVMe connections to hosts are not yet available.

Pure Storage FlashBlade

The file-storage-based Pure Storage FlashBlade

has been available for 18 months, and customer

adoption, market acceptance, performance and simple

administration have been good. The initial positioning

of the FlashBlade was for traditional file and object

storage workloads. However, due to the high levels of

parallelism in the scale-in multiple controller/blade

design, the FlashBlade has also become suitable for

high-performance (i.e., low-latency, high-bandwidth)

workloads and applications, such as near real-time

analytics, AI and machine learning. Nevertheless, the

FlashBlade can still be used for traditional file and

object storage workloads.

During the past 12 months, significant new

enhancements to the FlashBlade have been SMB,

IPv6, LDAP/NFS, S3 object support, and snapshots.

The HTTP/HTTPS/SMB/NFS are in a single username

space, and a RESTful API has become available.

Similar to the X-series SSAs, DirectFlash modules,

the FlashBlades, have been designed and engineered

by Pure Storage. This provides similar benefits in

terms of density and storage software offload and

disaggregation, which ultimately give Pure Storage the

ability to fine-tune the format, NAND/flash memory

packaging, performance and reliability. The minimum

number of blades that a customer can purchase is

seven. Each blade is 8.8TB, 17TB or 52.8TB, and the

system scales from 61TB to 792TB in four rack units.

The midsize 17TB blade, which provides a midsize

FlashBlade became available in 2017, and blades can

be nondisruptively added or removed. Administration

of the FlashBlade shares the same look and feel as the

M and X family of arrays and the Pure1 administration

suite. It can manage all //M, //X and FlashBlade

arrays, together with a centralized point of control,

monitoring and reporting.

Due to the nature of analytics, AI and machine

learning workloads, which require high input/output

operations per second (IOPS) and parallel access,

the FlashBlade has been successful in these new

high-performance data analytics workloads. Highly

parallelized, internal scale-out, solid-state storage

with the highly parallelized Nvidia DGX-1 GPU based

servers, has led to a partnership between the vendors.

This led to the creation of a joint integrated system,

the AIRI, which is a ready-made AI system in a rack.

The Pure Storage FlashBlade continues to successfully

push SSAs into new segments and applications. All

Pure Storage guarantees, Evergreen maintenance, pay-

as-you-grow programs are available for the FlashBlade,

and storage features are included in the base price.

However, data deduplication is not supported; only

compression is offered.

Tintri EC6000 Series

Tintri continues to deliver on its promise of a simple-

to-use SSA product line that’s extensively integrated

into hypervisors. The vendor’s product line was

upgraded in July and August 2017, when the new

EC6000 series of flash arrays became generally

23

available. However, the official public announcement

was made in September 2017. The older T5000

models can no longer be purchased. The new EC6000

series provides more scale, performance and capacity

than the previous T5000 series. The smallest model

in the EC6000 series, the EC6030 starts at 6.2TB and

the EC6000 expands to the largest EC6090 which has

129TB of raw capacity. This is a significant capacity

increase over the previous T5000, which was smaller.

However, compared with competitors’ arrays, the raw

capacity of the Tintri arrays are quite small. This is

due to the Tintri positioning of the arrays into high

data reduction environments and workloads in which

the effective, postdata reduction storage capacity is

several times larger than the raw capacity. Rather than

buying and implementing a single, large SSA with the

ability to scale, Tintri’s recommended deployment

method is to install many small, modular EC6000

systems, which are managed as one entity with the

Tintri Global Center Advanced administration software.

Host connections can be upgraded to optional

4 x 40GigE ports, which can also be used for

asynchronous replication. However, the deep

integration of the Tintri arrays into the hypervisors

via NFS does not work with physical servers at a block

LUN or volume level, but only with virtualized servers

running hypervisors at the logical virtual machine

(VM) level. This implementation enables Tintri arrays

to quickly restore whole VMs, rather than individual

volumes. An additional benefit of this VM software-

level snapshot implementation is the large number

of snapshots — as many as 128 snapshots per VM,

128,000 VM snapshots per array or 1,000,000 file-

system-level snapshots.

Western Digital IntelliFlash HD, N and T Series

The Western Digital IntelliFlash T-Series is a well-

established SSA, with a proven product track record

of providing extensive features, ease of use/ownership

and reliability, with FC, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS and SMB

3.0 support. IntelliFlash is available as a high-density

(HD) family, as well as an N-Series NVMe-based family.

Both allow performance and QoS to be selected and

managed at the cache, port, volume and LUN level

across block-and-file protocols. Today’s IntelliFlash

T-/HD/N-Series models scale in raw capacity from

11.5TB to 1.3PB; individually the N-Series arrays

scale in raw capacity from 19TB to 184TB. However,

InteliFlash provides a cluster mode that enables eight

arrays to be clustered together; therefore, in these

configurations, scalability is increased to a maximum

of 10.4PB (T-/N-Series) or 1.47PB (N-Series) for all

protocols.

All IntelliFlash arrays are physically and logically

space-efficient. Compression and deduplication are

both in-line and also individually selectable at the

volume level across file-and-block protocols and can

provide up to 10:1 effective capacities in certain

applications. T-Series customers can nondisruptively

upgrade to the N-Series. IntelliFlash arrays offer

all-inclusive storage licensing, fully featured storage

services and instrumentation scale-out clustering,

which provide higher flexibility than most other SSAs.

Cloud-based analytics is used to provide problem

prediction and trending within the Intellicare support

program. Guaranteed upgrades are provided by the

Lifetime Storage program and effective capacity

guarantees are part of the Flash 5 commitment

program. Data is encrypted on the SSDs and managed

by internal key management.

24

X-IO ISE 900 Series

X-IO launched its fourth-generation product, the ISE

900 series on September 2017, replacing its ISE

800 series, which had been released nearly 2.5 years

earlier. The array remains oriented toward its core

competency of low-latency, higher-performance use

cases and workloads. It now boasts new capabilities,

with a lower price point. The array is now based on 3D

TLC SSD technology, allowing it to be more economical

and scaling from 9.6TB to 230TB raw in a 2U node

supported by 16Gb fiber channel connections.

Also, data reduction has been enhanced with a new,

patented deduplication ability that claims to use

considerably fewer CPU resources and less DRAM,

thereby increasing its cost-efficiency. However, on

compression, this ability is available and continues to

be refined and optimized.

Deduplication and compression are selectable per

volume, but both are enabled and disabled together.

Snapshots and asynchronous replication round out

the other notable feature improvements. The ISE 900

series lacks native cloud integration, synchronous

replication and lags in terms of cloud-based

predictive analytics, compared with leading providers.

Although some of the manageability features may

still be evolving, X-IO does have competitive business

programs centered on efficiency and customer

satisfaction with lowest-price guarantee, clear

maintenance costs and flexible controller upgrades to

ensure investment protection. The controller upgrades

do not provide a pathway to NVMe technology,

because that is available via the separate Axellio

product line.

Context

The popularity and adoption of SSAs continues. This

is because of the SSAs’ performance advantage, as

well as simpler administration, extensive guarantee

and upgrade programs, security, improved reliability

compared with HDDs and high availability. Smaller,

denser storage, feature licensing and purchasing

methods make the overall value proposition more than

speeds and feeds.

The reduced environmental requirements of SSAs,

such as power and cooling, also have incidental and

important advantages over general-purpose arrays,

servers with internal storage and other HDD-based

storage systems. Due to these benefits, as well as

administration GUIs, which have been designed with

ease of use in mind, storage administration overhead

has been reduced, and storage provisioning tasks

can now be performed by nonstorage specialists.

As a result, less time needs to be spent performing

detailed configuration, performance tuning and

problem determination tasks, due to the sophisticated

controller software that, in some instances, can be

purchased separately as SDS offerings.

Product/Service Class Definition

The following descriptions and criteria classify SSA

architectures by their externally visible characteristics,

rather than vendor claims or other nonproduct criteria

that may be influenced by short-term trends in the

SSA storage market.

25

SSA

The SSA category is a subcategory of the broader

external-controller-based (ECB) storage market. SSAs

are scalable, dedicated solutions based solely on

solid-state semiconductor technology for data storage

that can never be configured with HDD technology. The

SSA category is distinct from SSD-only racks in ECB

storage arrays. An SSA must be a stand-alone product

denoted with a specific name and model number,

which typically (but not always) includes an OS and

data management software optimized for solid-state

technology.

To be considered an SSA, the storage software

management layer should enable most, if not all, of

the following benefits:

■ High availability

■ Enhanced-capacity efficiency — perhaps

through thin provisioning, compression or data

deduplication

■ Data management

■ Automated tiering within SSD technologies

■ Perhaps, other advanced software capabilities

— such as application-specific and OS-specific

acceleration, based on the unique workload

requirements of the data type being processed

Scale-Up Architectures

■ Front-end connectivity, internal, and back-

end bandwidth are fixed or scale to packaging

constraints, independent of capacity.

■ Logical volumes, files or objects are

fragmented and spread across user-defined

collections, such as solid-state pools, groups

or redundant array of independent disk (RAID)

sets.

■ Capacity, performance and throughput are

limited by physical packaging constraints, such

as the number of slots in a backplane and/or

interconnected constraints.

Scale-Out Architectures

■ Capacity, performance, throughput and

connectivity scale with the number of nodes in

the system.

■ Logical volumes, files or objects are

fragmented and spread across multiple storage

nodes to protect against hardware failure and

improve performance.

■ Scalability is limited by software and

networking architectural constraints, not

physical packaging or interconnect limitations.

Unified Architectures

■ These can simultaneously support one or more

block, file and/or object protocol — such as

Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI, Network File System

(NFS), SMB (aka CIFS), Fibre Channel over

Ethernet (FCoE) and InfiniBand.

■ Gateway and integrated data flow

implementations are included.

26

■ These architectures can be implemented as scale-

up or scale-out arrays.

Gateway implementations provision block storage to

gateways implementing network-attached storage

(NAS) and object storage protocols. Gateway-

style implementations run separate NAS and SAN

microcode loads on virtualized or physical servers.

As a result, they have different thin-provisioning,

autotiering, snapshot and remote copy features,

which are not interoperable. By contrast, integrated

or unified storage implementations use the same

primitives independent of the protocol. This enables

them to create snapshots that span SAN and NAS

storage, and dynamically allocate server cycles,

bandwidth and cache — based on QoS algorithms

and/or policies.

Mapping the strengths and weaknesses of these

different storage architectures to various use cases

should begin with an overview of each architecture’s

strengths and weaknesses and an understanding of

workload requirements (see Table 1).

Table 1. SSA Architectures

Strengths Weaknesses

Scale-Up ■ Mature architectures:

■ Reliable

■ Cost-competitive

■ Large ecosystems

■ Independently upgrade:

■ Host connections

■ Back-end capacity

■ May offer shorter recovery point objectives (RPOs)

over asynchronous distances

■ Performance and bandwidth do not

scale with capacity

■ Limited compute power can make a

high impact

■ Electronics failures and microcode

updates may be high-impact events

Scale-Out ■ IOPS and GB/sec scale with capacity

■ Nondisruptive load balancing

■ Greater fault tolerance than scale-up architectures

■ Use of commodity components

■ Electronics costs are high, relative

to back-end storage costs

Unified ■ Maximal deployment flexibility

■ Comprehensive storage efficiency features

■ Performance may vary by protocol

(block versus file)

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

27

Critical Capabilities Definition

Each critical capability consists of two parts. There is

an overview section, which is limited to 300 characters

or fewer, and a general section, which can be as long

as the author wishes. The overview section must be

one paragraph, no bullets or numbered lists. This

overview is what will appear when the reader hovers

over each critical capability on the interactive display;

remember, each critical capability name cannot be

more than 35 characters, including spaces.

Performance

This collective term is often used to describe IOPS,

bandwidth (MB/second) and response times,

milliseconds per input/output (I/O), that are visible to

attached servers.

Storage Efficiency

This refers to the ability of the platform to support

storage efficiency technologies, such as compression,

deduplication and thin provisioning, as well as improve

utilization rates, while reducing storage acquisition

and ownership costs.

RAS

Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) refers

to a design philosophy that consistently delivers

high availability by building systems with reliable

components and “derating” components to increase

their mean time between failure (MTBF).

Systems are designed to tolerate marginal

components and hardware, and microcode designs

that minimize the number of critical failure modes,

serviceability features that enable nondisruptive

microcode updates, diagnostics that minimize

human error when troubleshooting, and nondisruptive

repair activities. User-visible features can include

tolerance of multiple disk and/or node failures, fault-

isolation techniques, and built-in protection against

data corruption, as well as other techniques, such

as snapshots and replication (see Note 2), to meet

customers’ RPOs and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Scalability

This refers to the storage system’s ability to grow

capacity, as well as performance and host connectivity.

The concept of usable scalability links capacity growth

and system performance to SLAs and application

needs. (Capacities are total raw capacity and are not

usable, unless otherwise stated.)

Ecosystem

Ecosystem refers to the ability of the platform

to support multiple protocols, OSs, third-party

independent software vendor (ISV) applications, APIs

and multivendor hypervisors.

Multitenancy and Security

This refers to the ability of a storage system to

support diverse workloads, isolate workloads from

each other, and provide user access controls and

auditing capabilities that log changes into the system

configuration.

Manageability

Manageability refers to the automation, management,

monitoring and reporting related to tools and

programs supported by the platform.

28

The tools and programs can include single-pane

management consoles, as well as monitoring and

reporting tools designed to assist support personnel in

seamlessly managing systems and monitoring system

use and efficiency. They can also be used to anticipate

and correct system alarms and fault conditions before

or soon after they occur.

Use Cases

Each use case consists of two parts. There is an

overview section, which is limited to 175 characters

or fewer, and a general section, which can be as long

as the author wishes. The overview section must be

one paragraph, no bullets or numbered lists. This

overview is what will appear on each use-case tab on

the interactive display; remember, each use case name

cannot be more than 50 characters, including spaces.

Online Transaction Processing

Online transaction processing (OLTP) is closely

affiliated with business-critical applications, such as

database management systems (DBMSs).

DBMSs require 24/7 availability and subsecond

transaction response times; hence, the greatest

emphasis is on performance and RAS features.

Manageability and storage efficiency are important,

because they enable the storage system to scale

with data growth, while staying within budgetary

constraints.

Server Virtualization

This use case encompasses business-critical

applications, back-office and batch workloads, and

development.

The need to deliver low I/O response times to large

numbers of VMs or desktops that generate cache-

unfriendly workloads, while providing 24/7 availability.

This causes performance and storage efficiency to be

heavily weighted, followed closely by RAS.

High-Performance Computing

HPC clusters comprise large numbers of servers

and storage arrays, which combine to deliver high

computing densities and aggregated throughput.

Commercial HPC environments are characterized by

the need for high throughput and parallel read-and-

write access to large volumes of data. Performance,

scalability and RAS are important considerations for

this use case.

Analytics

This use case applies to all analytic applications that

are packaged or provide business intelligence (BI)

capabilities for a specific domain or business problem.

Analytics does not apply only to storage consumed by

big data applications using map/reduce technologies

(see definition in “Hype Cycle for Data Science,

2016”).

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

VDI is the practice of hosting a desktop OS within a

VM running on a centralized server. IT is a variation of

the client/server computing model.

This is sometimes referred to as server-based

computing (SBC). Performance and storage efficiency

(in-line data reduction) features are heavily weighted

29

for this use case, for which SSAs are emerging as

popular alternatives. The performance weighting was

reduced by 5%, and manageability was increased

by 5%. Manageability has become a relatively

greater concern and priority in this use case than

performance.

Vendors Added and Dropped

Added

Huawei

Dropped

None

Inclusion Criteria

■ The vendor’s SSA product must have been

in general availability (GA) by 4 March 2018.

This does not include product trial or early

ship programs, such as beta systems, directed

availability or dates of product announcements.

■ The specific SSA vendor must have revenue of

recognizable, combined SSA sales of at least

$15 million during the past 12 months prior to

31 March 2018. This is based on documented

information provided to Gartner by each vendor, so

that Gartner can verify this as clear and convincing

proof beyond reasonable doubt.

■ The Gartner SSA Magic Quadrant and Critical

Capabilities authors choose and reserve the right

to include one or two products from each vendor

in the CC, based on the author’s analysis of the

market and client interest. Because this is forward-

looking research, and is not based solely on past

sales and revenue, but future market direction,

technologies and customer demands might not

include the vendor’s SSA product with the highest

sales revenue or units sold. Similar products based

on common platforms/software or offerings that

Gartner believes will merge or be combined into

one, such as NVMe-capable products, will have one

entry in this research, because of their common

technology and features. However, SSA products

not included in the Critical Capabilities research

may be mentioned and analyzed in the Magic

Quadrant.

■ The ultimate decision for product, series or

model inclusion will be decided by Gartner, as

determined by Gartner client interest, as well as

Gartner’s view of the present and future direction

of the market, technology and users requirements.

■ Just a Bunch of Flash or SSDs (JBOF/S) will not be

included within the Critical Capabilities research.

This research covers arrays and, therefore, only

SSAs with internal controllers providing storage

features or high-level data services, such as thin

provisioning, data reduction features, replication

and snapshots, will be included.

The SSAs evaluated in this research include scale-up,

scale-out and unified storage architectures. Because

these arrays have different availability characteristics,

performance profiles, scalability, ecosystem support,

pricing and warranties, they enable users to tailor

solutions against operational needs, planned new

application deployments, forecast growth rates and

asset management strategies.

30

Although this SSA Critical Capabilities research

represents vendors with dedicated systems that

meet our inclusion criteria, the application workload

ultimately governs which solutions should be

considered, regardless of the criteria involved.

Some vendors may still warrant investigation based

on application workload needs for their SSD-only

offerings. The following providers and products

were considered for this research, but did not meet

the inclusion criteria, despite offering SSD-only

configuration options to existing products:

■ American Megatrends

■ Apeiron

■ DirectData Networks (DDN)

■ Excelero

■ E8

■ Pavilion Data Systems

■ Pivot3

■ Nexsan

■ Nimbus Data

■ VAST Data

■ Vexata

■ Violin Systems

Table 2. Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases

Critical

Capabilities

Online Transaction

Processing

Server

Virtualization

High-Performance

Computing

Analytics Virtual Desktop

Infrastructure

Performance 28% 20% 44% 36% 25%

Storage

Efficiency

14% 20% 4% 15% 30%

RAS 20% 15% 15% 13% 15%

Scalability 8% 10% 20% 18% 4%

Ecosystem 10% 10% 3% 4% 8%

Multitenancy

and Security

5% 5% 4% 4% 5%

Manageability 15% 20% 10% 10% 13%

Total 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

As of August 2018

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

31

This methodology requires analysts to identify the

critical capabilities for a class of products/services.

Each capability is then weighed in terms of its relative

importance for specific product/service use cases.

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Performance 3.9 4.0 3.9 4.2 4.0 3.9 3.9 3.8 4.2 3.8 4.5 4.1 3.8 4.7 4.4 4.0 3.7 4.0

Storage Efficiency 3.9 2.8 4.3 3.7 3.9 4.4 3.5 3.5 3.9 3.0 4.1 4.0 3.8 2.8 4.5 4.5 4.4 3.7

RAS 3.6 3.9 3.7 4.0 3.7 3.7 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.7 3.7 3.7 3.9 3.6 3.8 3.5 3.5 3.4

Scalability 3.7 3.7 3.4 4.0 4.2 3.7 3.4 4.2 3.7 3.9 4.0 3.9 4.0 3.8 3.4 3.7 3.4 3.2

Ecosystem 3.8 4.2 3.6 4.0 3.7 3.7 3.6 3.5 3.6 3.9 3.5 4.1 3.5 2.8 3.7 3.8 3.6 3.2

Multitenancy and

Security

3.7 3.8 3.6 3.8 3.6 3.8 3.4 3.5 3.9 3.9 3.3 3.6 3.9 2.9 3.3 3.4 3.4 3.4

Manageability 3.8 3.7 3.6 3.6 4.0 4.5 3.5 3.5 3.8 3.9 3.9 3.9 4.1 4.0 4.2 3.7 4.1 3.1

As of August 2018

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

Table 3. Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities

Critical Capabilities Rating

These are the product and service ratings for the solid-

state arrays.

32

Table 4 shows the product/service scores for each use

case. The scores, which are generated by multiplying

the use case weightings by the product/service

ratings, summarize how well the critical capabilities

are met for each use case.

Use

Cas

es

Del

l EM

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nit

y A

ll-Fl

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Del

l EM

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ll-Fl

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tern

us

AF

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ies

Hit

achi VS

P F

Ser

ies

HP

E 3

PAR

Sto

reS

erv

All-

Flas

h A

rray

s

HP

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imble

Sto

rage

All-

Flas

h S

erie

s

Huaw

ei O

cean

Sto

r D

orad

o V3 S

erie

s

Huaw

ei O

cean

Sto

r F

V5 S

erie

s

IBM

Fla

shS

yste

m A

9000 S

erie

s

IBM

Sto

rwiz

e A

ll-Fl

ash S

erie

s

Kam

inar

io K

2

Net

App A

FF A

-Ser

ies

Net

App S

F S

erie

s

Pure

Sto

rage

Fla

shB

lade

Pure

Sto

rage

M a

nd X

Ser

ies

Wes

tern

Dig

ital

Inte

lliFl

ash H

D,

N a

nd T

Ser

ies

Tin

tri EC

6000 S

erie

s

X-I

O I

SE 9

00 S

erie

s

Online Transaction

Processing

3.79 3.75 3.79 3.94 3.89 3.98 3.61 3.66 3.88 3.71 3.99 3.94 3.86 3.76 4.06 3.85 3.77 3.53

Server Virtualization 3.80 3.67 3.80 3.89 3.91 4.05 3.58 3.65 3.86 3.67 3.97 3.94 3.87 3.65 4.07 3.89 3.84 3.48

High-Performance

Computing

3.79 3.85 3.74 4.03 3.97 3.90 3.66 3.79 3.94 3.79 4.13 3.96 3.88 4.08 4.03 3.83 3.66 3.60

Analytics 3.80 3.72 3.79 3.98 3.95 3.96 3.63 3.75 3.92 3.70 4.10 3.96 3.87 3.89 4.07 3.89 3.75 3.59

Virtual Desktop

Infra-structure

3.82 3.58 3.89 3.90 3.89 4.07 3.60 3.62 3.90 3.58 4.02 3.95 3.84 3.60 4.16 3.98 3.90 3.58

As of August 2018

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

Table 4. Product Score in Use Cases

To determine an overall score for each product/service

in the use cases, multiply the ratings in Table 3 by the

weightings shown in Table 2.

33

Evidence

Data has been gathered from client interactions during

the past year, vendor briefings and references; and

detailed questionnaire responses from and review calls

with all profiled vendors.

Critical Capabilities Methodology

This methodology requires analysts to identify the

critical capabilities for a class of products or services.

Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative

importance for specific product or service use cases.

Next, products/services are rated in terms of how

well they achieve each of the critical capabilities. A

score that summarizes how well they meet the critical

capabilities for each use case is then calculated for

each product/service.

“Critical capabilities” are attributes that differentiate

products/services in a class in terms of their quality

and performance. Gartner recommends that users

consider the set of critical capabilities as some of the

most important criteria for acquisition decisions.

In defining the product/service category for evaluation,

the analyst first identifies the leading uses for the

products/services in this market. What needs are end-

users looking to fulfill, when considering products/

services in this market? Use cases should match

common client deployment scenarios. These distinct

client scenarios define the Use Cases.

The analyst then identifies the critical capabilities.

These capabilities are generalized groups of features

commonly required by this class of products/services.

Each capability is assigned a level of importance in

fulfilling that particular need; some sets of features

are more important than others, depending on the use

case being evaluated.

Each vendor’s product or service is evaluated in terms

of how well it delivers each capability, on a five-point

scale. These ratings are displayed side-by-side for

all vendors, allowing easy comparisons between the

different sets of features.

Ratings and summary scores range from 1.0 to 5.0:

1 = Poor or Absent: most or all defined requirements

for a capability are not achieved

2 = Fair: some requirements are not achieved

3 = Good: meets requirements

4 = Excellent: meets or exceeds some requirements

5 = Outstanding: significantly exceeds requirements

To determine an overall score for each product in the

use cases, the product ratings are multiplied by the

weightings to come up with the product score in use

cases.

The critical capabilities Gartner has selected do not

represent all capabilities for any product; therefore,

may not represent those most important for a specific

use situation or business objective. Clients should

use a critical capabilities analysis as one of several

sources of input about a product before making a

product/service decision.

Source: Gartner Research Note G00338538, Valdis Filks, John Monroe, Joseph Unsworth, Santhosh Rao, 6 August 2018

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