Analyse this: Gartner eyes up everyone's mid-range arrays

Re: no EQL?

Agreed, I thought it strange that EQL wasn't listed. Perhaps the rumors are true and Dell is basically sidelining EQL for Compellant.

I'd like to know more about the "use case" and what models and capacities they picked from different manufacturers. Since we're in the market for a new SAN maybe I'll bug our vendor for a copy of this Gartner report. "Agility" can mean many things so it's odd they don't specify nor was it one of the evaluation factors.

Re: no EQL?

@Nate: No, Dell really doesn't want to sell EQL any more except to the installed base reluctant to migrate (they want new customers on Compellent). They are pricing the new SC4020 array to blow the EQL stuff out of the water. There is a roadmap for existing customers though which is nice, but it ends with replicating your EQLs to a shiny new Compellent. There is a fairly new gen of EQL so I wouldn't expect to see it die off for another several years but I don't think Dell would put it up in sales scenarios where they are better positioned to win with Compellent.

I also agree with your comment around how effectively useless this report is. And it really is useless, since the weighting of the categories will vary from one company to another. I resell some of those systems and for a large number of my customers, the winning product ends up being something other than what Gartner thinks is best based on their critetia.

Re: Rubbish report

Yes and others have fully symmetric active-active multi controller capabilities vs the rest who only have dual controllers and in most cases active / passive or pseudo active / active, which can make a huge difference to performance scalability and availability....I'll stop at that point.

But this is a high level buyers guide nothing more, if you wanted to get down into the weeds you could go on forever with a report at 1000 pages which is immediately out of date the day it's published, so time to market can be of value. It's nowhere near perfect and I dislike these reports as they allow potential buyers to dumb down their selection criteria, triggering a race to the bottom. Which in many cases just leads to the buyer ending up one of the losers, albeit unsuspecting at that point.

I suppose it does give a very high level indication of each players capabilities but what it really fails to do miserably is provide any real differentiation. E.g. Your analogy of the BMW vs Ford argument and that they're all much of a much-ness. When in reality many have major differences that can and do impact real world capabilities once outside the marketing dept / spec sheet.

Despite Gartners record I don't agree with storage magazine.

"2.Do these analysts look at the underlying architecture of the storage including things like Memory bandwidth of cache? Design of the front and back end connectivity to cache (think PCIe buses and channels)?"

What has the above got to do with anything, you can have the fastest hardware on the block, but if your software can't take advantage then the speeds and feeds are meaningless, just ask EMC's VNX 1 customers.

Platform architecture plays a part but few in the midrange differ enough to make it matter. Just because you've added more of Intel's latest and greatest doesn't mean you're suddenly faster, that's where storage really does differ from servers, common hardware but no common storage OS to provide a baseline. In reality It's all about front end (application) performance, flexibility and support not pissing competitions over CPU cores and cache bandwidth.

If you do get chance to read the report, it's not that bad, lacks geeky product detail like the above but does do the Vendor / platform positioning quite well. Much better than the high end version that seemed to have platforms in there simply to make up the numbers.