Look out...
I see a Gartner-shaped lawsuit coming your way...
There is a famous 4-box diagram, the one to end all 4-box diagrams; Gartner's Magic Quadrant. How would the all-flash array vendors; start-ups and mainstreamers alike, fare if located in a 4-box diagram space? The storage desk here at El Reg did just that, using its sophisticated lower abdominal sensing organ and its patent- …
Surely to draw the middle of the pack you should be using some sort of non-parametric estimation for the density of the points and then calculating a 50% contour...?
You could then draw the axes through the centroid of this and turn it into the crosshairs of doom.
Of course, however you present it, it is still nonsense (tm).
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We are going through a full flash evaluation at the moment. Still waiting on demos from well everyone..... but in our pre-analysis kaminario and pure are the standouts. IBM well I personally dont like the design as its a bit tough to maintain in environments where you get limited cable slack. Netapp well they need to get flashray out because the e series seems severely limited in their shoe horning attempt to get something to market. EMC we are avoiding due to cost purely and a painful UI at least when we tested the older VNX5300. Overall I think there is still a lot of innovation to come and these smaller companies seem to be taking it a bit more seriously than the big guys course a lot of that is probably due to corporate red tape at the bigger places. I havent been this excited to get demo units for quite a while as I want to see how hard we can push them.
Anon because my employer says i shouldnt talk.
Me: "Hello"
Him: "Hi, this is James Sausage from Stuffers Data Service. Have you heard of us?"
Me: "No. You say you make sausage?"
Him: "Ha ha. No, we are a relatively new company that provides the Stuffit Data Silo, and we are in the Gartner Magic Quadrant [ *sparkle-sparkle* ]. Have you ever heard of Stuffit Data Silo?"
Me: "No, I can't say that I have"
Him: "Oh, well, the Stuffit Data Silo integrates into your <blah blah blah > leverages <blah blah> cloud based <blah blah blabbity blah>. We..."
<click>
In general, once a cold-call salesperson tells me (proudly, always) that they are in the Gartner Magic Quadrant [ *sparkle-sparkle* ], the phone call is basically over. It's just a question of how soon I will hang up.
Having lost faith in mainstream analysts and tired of paying for their lunches we developed and deployed our own internal system based on the same sorcery used by Gartner. We call it 'The Magic Ovoid'.
The Magic Ovoid works as follows. We put the names of all the vendors who call on us each week onto their own small sheet of paper. The papers are placed into The Magic Ovoid and the employee who won the 'Most Impossible to Answer Vendor Question Award' that week defecates into The Magic Ovoid. Our patented random hydraulic mixing technology sorts the papers and magic ingredients and automatically disposes of those which are unsuitable. The winning name (or names) that remain in The Magic Ovoid are then used as the targets for the following weeks 'Most Impossible to Answer Vendor Question' contest.
All in all we have found that just adding some shit to random marketing gibberish provides results at least as accurate as those of analysts. Our methods are significantly cheaper and easily replicated by any interested parties using only equipment and supplies found in every office.
I think from this reading, it's basically a 3-way tie for the most part, Violin, Pure, and the potential for EMC to make a move.
I know of some EMC demo boxes out in the wild, and I'll leave it at that. I know of a LOT of EMC folks moving over to Pure from the sales and SE side of things.
All EMC needs to do is actually hurry up with a product. Pure is getting the sales team together, from EMC, and needs to get some big wins, and marquee customers. As for Violin, I have yet to see them in my patch of the woods.