Dell is certainly proud to once again be recognized by Gartner as a leader in the recently published “2016 Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays”, but to look at this MQ in isolation would be missing the forest for the trees. Instead, it’s important to interpret Dell’s placement in the larger context of our customer’s transformation journey.
The Journey is the End-State
Dell declared 2016 the “Year of All Flash”, and many organizations are rapidly adopting our all-flash solutions to help them accelerate their IT and business transformation journey. But no two organizations are alike when it comes to transformation and not surprisingly many organizations still rely upon traditional general-purpose arrays within their data centers. This is why Dell’s positioning as a leader in the General-Purpose Disk Array market is so important.
Customers want and need complete choice and flexibility on their transformation journey and they want to rely upon one vendor to address all their challenges. And while Dell Technologies and Dell both have individual positions in this year’s MQ due to research and customer reference checks happening pre-merger, the important takeaway is that our solutions are recognized within the Leaders quadrant – and will only get better now that we’re one company.
Furthermore, a core tenet of our portfolio strategy is to provide customers with the ultimate in choice and flexibility regardless of the problem they are trying to solve. That means offering market-leading solutions for both general-purpose arrays as well as solid-state arrays. We’re also enabling choice and flexibility with software! Dell recently announced we have boosted the capabilities of our mid-market proven SC Series (formerly Compellent™) storage arrays by making them interoperable with the world’s leading portfolio of storage management, mobility and data protection solutions formerly only available to EMC customers. By rapidly extending key software capabilities to include the SC series, we enable our customers to mix and match our storage products and services within their enterprises while taking advantage of a common user experience with the same storage management, data protection and mobility capabilities.
Isilon is a another mainstay in general-purpose disk arrays that lends its success as the #1 scale-out NAS array to Dell’s overall storage market leadership. With more than 10 years of market growth and over 7,000 customers, Isilon continues to rapidly evolve and innovate to meet our customers’ growing demands for storing and analyzing unstructured data-based workloads. In fact, Gartner’s first-ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File System and Object Storage published last month provides a more detailed look at Isilon. Click on the link above to find out what Gartner thinks. If you ask us, t’s pretty clear the industry recognizes that Isilon is leading the scale-out file system market due to its stability, high data efficiency, management simplicity and the high level of customer satisfaction.
It’s All in the Journey
Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, ‘It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” This adage is as true in business as in life; transformation is the journey and organizations need to be able to rely on their trusted vendors to help them get from where they are to where they want to be.
The good news is that as customers journey towards all-flash storage as a pillar of the modern data center strategy, Dell is with them every step of the way. We believe this bears out as evidenced by our leadership in both the general-purpose MQ as well as our recognition in the leaders quadrant of Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays.
Dell has been recognized as a leader in 21 Gartner Magic Quadrants. We feel this position in Gartner’s latest report lets the world know what our customers are experiencing every day—that Dell delivers choice and flexibility with world-class products to meet business needs today, tomorrow and beyond. This recognition supports our belief that no other vendor is better equipped to enable digital transformation than Dell.
View the full report from Gartner, “2016 Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays”.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
