Over the years, Gartner Magic Quadrants have become iconic in the IT industry. A place where vendors are evaluated together with long-time competitors, as well as smaller up-and-coming startups.
In the storage market, the magic quadrants have traditionally had long-standing, very clearly defined swim lanes – high-end storage in one quadrant, mid-range storage in another, and so on.
For the longest time, this made perfect sense. After all, why would you compare a heavyweight boxer to a middleweight? They’re not going to end up in the ring together, so why bother?
But the storage landscape is changing and, to their credit, Gartner has responded with an all-new “General Purpose Disk Array” Magic Quadrant, which was released earlier today. This new quadrant takes a consolidated view of vendors’ storage lines, evaluating mid-range storage, scale-out NAS, and enterprise storage offerings holistically. For EMC, that means our VNX, Isilon, and VMAX lines.
At EMC we’re committed to providing best-of-breed storage products, ensuring our customers always have the right tool for the right job. This shift, however, in the way Gartner is viewing and evaluating storage is not just about products. It’s about strategy and vision, and their elevated importance to customers in today’s changing (and somewhat chaotic) IT landscape.
Why Strategy is King…
The fact that EMC is recognized in the leaders quadrant in this new consolidated research is huge for EMC and, more importantly, our customers. We believe being recognized for our strength in both vision and execution across storage lines, our storage product strategy is clearly a testament to our successful strategy. But why is this so important to our customers? IT professionals are negotiating multiple waves of transformational change. Infrastructure is being standardized, virtualized, and automated as CIO’s look to deliver IT-as-a-Service. Traditional applications are being moved to this new dynamic, agile infrastructure and the business is driving IT to deliver new insight through Big Data analytics. Finally, applications are being accessed by a host of new devices that IT doesn’t procure or provision. These waves of change are driving new requirements and new architectures in the underlying storage infrastructure and our customers can rest assured that we’ve got their bases covered.
We look at VNX, Isilon and VMAX as “a very good start” but we’re not standing still. You’ll see EMC deepen and broaden the product line later this year with new industry leading offerings in the world of flash and object storage. That’s part of our commitment to not just be a leader for 2013, but to continue to lead in future.
Get the new Gartner Magic Quadrant Research Report Right Here
EMC believes this new Gartner Magic Quadrant is essential reading and we have taken steps to make the research available to all at no cost. The new quadrant and associated research is available now and can be accessed directly below.
Download the new Gartner General Purpose Disk Array Magic Quadrant 2012
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