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back to article HP one of the fairest, claims Gartner's magic quadrant on the wall

Gartner has announced that HP has joined the leaders in its all-flash array magic quadrant, while Violin Memory, Nimbus Data and Cisco have been demoted, and Dell and HDS are excluded altogether from the MQ because of the research giant's peculiar classification criteria. The MQ classifies suppliers in what Gartner calls the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Out of date already

    The problem is, this MQ is based on Gartner analyzing products that were sold in the past year. The AFA marketplace moves so quickly that many of the vendors already have new products out with differing capabilities... it just feels like Gartner can never catch up.

    1 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bias All Around

    Having worked for a series of companies that were rated in the same MQ (and Forrester Wave) for years, I think I can safely say that the roadshows that the vendors put on for the analysts are a far cry from reality. At best, they're a reflection of widely held industry opinion already, at worst, they're a simple reflection of marketing materials, biased customer interviews and whomever is paying Gartner the most for their, "Services." None of these analysts have any bias disclosure like you'd expect in academia or journalism, so people shouldn't take their analysis seriously at all.

    3 1 Reply
    1. John 104
      Reply Icon

      Re: Bias All Around

      So true. If you want to be in the magic quadrant follow this recipe:

      Come out with a product of some sort.

      Get a few customers.

      Pay Gartner a shit ton of money to "review" your product.

      You are now in the magic quadrant.

      The whole thing is a joke.

      6 0 Reply
  3. Nate Amsden

    will be interesting to see

    for me anyway what impact HP's latest 3PAR has on this stuff, since this is as of June of this year, the new 20k systems I don't think ship till August, and they are what I'd consider the first *really* good 3PAR flash systems (not that the 7450 isn't good it is but these 20ks are just so much faster and very cost effective relative to their competition anyway).

    2 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Gartner (GG) SSA Market analysis & MQ includes IBM V840 and V9000! Why !? And HP 7200 !Why?

    Its me again :)

    No upgrade AFA with HDD - MQ inclusion rule:

    I dont understand the addl GG rule that the AFA cannot have ability to upgrade to HDD in the field. Makes no sense. ! Of course at that time it is really not an AFA but it was for awhile and customer decided they

    want to archive flash data or migrate in from HDD to flash - then operates as AFA from that pt on.

    However , If GG stuck do this rule then they should not be including the IBM V840 and V9000 because those product's ibm doc clearly state they can be upgraded to add disk .!! Those IBM products revenue /capacity numbers, at minimum, should be removed from GG market share analysis to be fair!!!! and include only the FS820/840/900.

    Regarding GGs MQ chart:- for GG's purpose of this MQ it makes no sense to eliminate HFA vendor products which are configured as AFA, in fact ignoring those vendors could lower the value of the MQ altogether . Eg Those vendor products may have features which in ssa market could be leaders and visionaries (like HDS or others) . The quadrant chart seems useless especially since HP is positioned so much lower than EMC IBM relattive to SSA! ? no sense at all!. However i think the detail on vendors strengths and cautions are reasonble and worth reading..

    PS - also the GG report on SSA Market share clearly states that it includes 7200 series - "introduction of a cost-effective, entry-level solution: the 3PAR StoreServ 7200c All-Flash Array. and on HP site they clearly state that HDDs can be added to 7200/7200c . Hmmm ; I guess Chris was right - corrective lenses strongly needed for the old guys in GG!!!!

    1 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Gartner (GG) SSA Market analysis & MQ includes IBM V840 and V9000! Why !? And HP 7200 !Why?

      The IBM FlashSystem solutions (V840 and V9000) are sold as AFA. Yes, disk can be brought into the fold because these solutions are built on a proven and widely deployed virtualization technology (storage hypervisor). The ability to bring in over 300 brands and models of disk arrays into the fold for tiering, volume mobility, extended storage efficiency, and and single point of management has always been a feature and strength of the IBM Storwize family (IBM Spectrum Virtualize). IBM would be foolish to cripple this capability as it is a key differentiator and unique strength of the platform that pays huge cost saving dividends to the customer. You do not have to add external disk but the capability is inherently there. IBM FlashSystem can be an "island" of flash storage like the others or it can be a complete storage strategy for the datacenter. You can choose,

      2 0 Reply
    2. El Storage Master
      Reply Icon

      Re: Gartner (GG) SSA Market analysis & MQ includes IBM V840 and V9000! Why !? And HP 7200 !Why?

      I will politely intervene so that you do not confuse other readers.

      1. I have to back Gartner in how they exclude Hitachi and Dell. I do not normally back Gartner, but here is what needs to be understood. An AFA cannot have an internal controller that is BOTH flash-optimized and disk-optimized at the same time. Any internal controller that supports disk will positively, absolutely, bottleneck flash media. Therefore, you cannot consider any system containing this type of controller, as an AFA, because it is really designed for HYBRID. The Hitachi boxes, even with all-SSD configs, are large and bulky, and look nothing like all of the other vendors' small form factor HW boxes. Again, Gartner got this right.

      2. IBM's v840 and v900 is a self-contained AFA that is flash-only media. It has absolutely no HDD in it and you cannot put HDD in it. What you are seeing is that IBM has SVC technology that can be used in front of the v840 and v9000 to leverage other HDD-based storage in an environment, even other vendor's storage.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Gartner (GG) SSA Market analysis & MQ includes IBM V840 and V9000! Why !? And HP 7200 !Why?

        There isn't a storage controller in existence that will not be a bottleneck if sufficient number of SSDs are run at 100% transfer rate. And this number is not all that large. So we have an enterprise grade SSD capable of sustaining 1GB/sec transfer from a single device. That's great, now throw 100 of them behind a glorified purpose built server and see how you are going to get that 100 GB/s data stream to your hosts (ignoring the fact that you would need a lot of hosts and anywhere from 100 to 150 10GbE connections into the storage array). Good luck with your purpose built, flash optimized front end. I'll go get my bacon and eggs ready to cook on top of the chassis as the system resources are ground up and spit out.

        0 0 Reply
  5. cleanur

    Yeah but really all your saying is we stuck an SVC (designed to virtualize spinning disk) in front of a flash JBOD we bought from TMS (along with a nice blanking plate) to make it semi usable, same as Violin. Sorry but only IBM stalwarts would even consider such a half baked product given the alternatives available.

    0 0 Reply

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