back to article When you play the game of storage arrays, you win or you – where are the visionaries?

NetApp has replaced HPE as the leading vendor in Gartner's general purpose drive array magic quadrant as Infinidat makes its first appearance in the top dog square. General purpose drive arrays are all-disk and hybrid flash storage offering block and file services. They are separate in Gartner's thinking from solid-state …

  1. mikeymac

    Congrats, Infinidat!

    As a customer, I can vouch for the rock-solid reliability and performance of the InfiniBox. It also continues to be the best customer support experience of my long career.

    Price it. POC it. Purchase it.

    Congratulations on your continued success!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HPE slipping away

    Watch HPE slip away from the top. They acquired Nimble and are slowly turning that into another classic HPE product...more expensive, less reliable, support moving to India, etc.

    I feel like their whole storage portfolio is disconnected and confusing - too many acquisitions I think.

    1. fredesmite

      Re: HPE slipping away

      That is exactly why HPE removed the "INVENT" . logo years ago ! It should be " BOUGHT AND OUTSOURCE "

    2. CIA

      Re: HPE slipping away

      Nimble guy here... You guys are way off base with your comments. We haven't raised our prices. For example, Pure Storage is more expensive than buying a Nimble system and it offers much less. Our reliability is superb. We have >15,000 customers running on InfoSight and >25,000 systems deployed. I have yet to hear a complaint. Our support has not been outsourced, Nimble Tier 3 is the same as its always been... call the 800 number and talk directly to a Tier 3 Support engineer. Try that with the competitors, you'll start at Tier 1. InfoSight takes care of those Tier 1 and 2 issues, that's why everyone and their brother is copying it and claiming AI capability. Gartner recognizes that its now a requirement in enterprise environments. And, our storage portfolio is aligned, MSA through the channels, Nimble in the general purpose/enterprise zone, 3PAR in the performance zone, and XP7 in the enterprise. NetApp is getting attention because they went back and 'farmed' their existing customer base for 3-4 quarters and made their revenue look good. We hardly saw them at all in customer accounts, what are they going to do now. Take the analysts with a grain of salt, the quadrant is a barometer that changes based upon who's tooting their horn the loudest and its very subjective. It's a starting point when you're looking for a system. Now you have the competitive scoop.

      1. spinning risk

        Re: HPE slipping away

        You're pontificating to other vendors, not many customers here...Keep drinking the Kool-Aid kid.

        I was with 3PAR for many years and after we got purchased the product lost its luster and was folded into HPe and became just another SKU, albeit better than the Left-Hand product which dissolved.

        Good luck with your marginal portfolio of vanilla products....

      2. WYSIWYG650

        Re: HPE slipping away

        Nimble...? Are they still around? Oh, not for long. HPE will put it out to pasture or blend it with their other mediocre storage. How many "lucky" quarters has NTAP had? quite a few and by now it's starting to seem pretty obvious that NetApp is the only game left in town. ONTAP storage OS runs on white box, engineered system, cloud, hybrid, and supports all protocols(minus object). Best of breed AI reference architecture with NVIDIA and the ability to serve your needs from edge to core to cloud and the data fabric is no longer vapor. Please help me understand what innovations Nimble is up to? Oh and if they get HCI right....good night Irene.

  3. fredesmite

    No Violin ?

    They claim to be back in the game

    1. CIA

      Re: No Violin ?

      Violin just bought X-IO after coming out of bankruptcy. It doubled their account base and that may help. Violin has a ways to go, their branding took a big hit and people consider them dead at the moment. Good luck to them, let's see if they can bring it back.

  4. smooter

    Nimble/HPE leads the way...

    Legacy Nimble/Current HPE guy here...

    First and foremost, Nimble is still alive and kicking, trust me! Our Support team is still the same/still awesome, and R&D is running on all cylinders (keep your eyes/ears open!), and we are having a blast!

    Second, Sincerest form of flattery and all set aside...

    5 years ago (actually longer, but I am trying to be nice) there were ZERO Predictive Analytics/AI/Machine Learning offerings in storage or anywhere else in the IT industry...Nimble comes to the plate with InfoSight and now everybody has something they are "calling" PA/AI/ML...but do the research yourself, if it isn't ACTUALLY InfoSight, it most certainly IS NOT InfoSight... "like" or otherwise!

    Case in point: Ask a new Nimble customer what they like about their array 4-6 months after install and they will tell you they like the performance, ease of use, integration, features, etc. Ask them the same question 12-16 months later...there response is "I Love InfoSight"! They take the storage for granted, not because it isn't an outstanding product, but because storage should NOT be something to focus on, it should just be a resource that does its job without babysitting!

    Speeds and feeds are old news, what vendors do with the hardware, and what they do above it, is all that is relevant! Don't get caught up in buzzwords, non-ratified protocols, and smoke and mirrors. Things ARE, or they ARE NOT...there is no "like"!

    HPE is interested in IT running at the speed of business, not the traditional business at the speed of IT!

    Just my $.02

    1. spinning risk

      Re: Nimble/HPE leads the way...

      Pure is eating your lunch, even with Infosight....

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