Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Ranks Huawei in Leader Category

Oct 27, 2021

Gartner has just released its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage, recognizing Huawei as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for the sixth consecutive year.

My first thought on reading the report was that the overall ranking was similar to 2020 with a few notable changes.

A total of 13 primary storage vendors were selected this year. Other than newcomer Zadara and Oracle, which wasn’t selected, the vendors were the same as 2020: DDN, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, NetApp, and Pure Storage.

The eight selected vendors in the Leaders Quadrant were exactly the same as in 2020.

Their rankings, however, have changed significantly. Huawei improved significantly in both Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute, jumping two places in the former and one in the latter. What are the reasons for this improvement? The Gartner report answers this through its analysis of the three main strengths of Huawei’s primary storage.

Source: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage 2020

1. Advanced Product Capabilities

Since 2002, Huawei has built storage R&D centers in various locations around the world, including the storage algorithm research center in Russia; cutting-edge technology research centers in India and Israel; and R&D and delivery competence centers in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Beijing. To date, Huawei has hired more than 4,000 storage engineers, registered over 3,000 patents, and joined more than 30 international industry organizations, continuously improving our ability to innovate and enhancing the competitiveness along the way.

As a result, we’ve become the only vendor to provide its own SSDs, controllers, and flash storage OS. OceanStor all-flash storage gets its competitive edge from three core features: it’s fast, solid, and intelligent. It sets a new benchmark for performance and reliability in the enterprise storage market. Leveraging the industry’s only E2E acceleration platform and innovative NoF+ solution, OceanStor all-flash storage delivers up to 21 million SPC-1 IOPS and latency as low as 0.05 ms, and its NAS performance is 30% higher than that of the industry’s next best. The fully interconnected SmartMatrix architecture also allows a single system to tolerate a maximum of seven controller failures, delivering 99.99999% system reliability and ensuring services always run. Moreover, the intelligent architecture uses machine learning algorithms to implement self-optimization of storage resource provisioning, improving the read cache hit ratio by 20%.

2. Simplified Data Center Management

The intelligent storage O&M system predicts and locates faults, analyzes performance and capacity expansion needs, and provides system health status updates, greatly reducing O&M costs. The intelligent identification of workloads and dynamic tuning of storage system parameters (cache prefetch parameters, disk selection algorithm, and deduplication algorithm) apply intelligence to provide optimal system functionality. Huawei’s intelligent all-flash storage supports training and inference based on machine learning and data rules, making storage smarter.

3. High Performance and Long-Term Investment in Roadmap Initiatives

According to Gartner, Huawei’s storage revenue continued to grow in Q2 2021, ranking third in global storage revenue and first in China’s storage market. More than 15,000 customers in over 150 countries and regions have deployed Huawei OceanStor storage. These include customers in industries such as telecommunications, finance, government, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation. Huawei OceanStor storage is the ideal choice for customers looking to store and process their service data.

Seven of the world’s top 20 banks use OceanStor all-flash storage, as do China’s top 12 banks and top 4 insurance companies.

China Life has been using Huawei OceanStor high-end all-flash storage since 2015. The highly reliable solution provides China Life with a stable and reliable data storage, analysis, and management platform. In addition, Huawei’s HyperMetro technology supports an active-active solution for SAN and NAS. The organization has deployed the solution in its core business systems, including underwriting, claims settlement, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), actuarial, and OA. It meets China Life’s data synchronization requirements across its multi-active data centers, as well as its business production requirements.

How Gartner Defines Primary Storage Definition

Primary storage covers vendors that offer dedicated products or product lines for solid state arrays (SSAs) or hybrid storage arrays (or both), and software-defined storage (SDS) software. A primary storage product’s foremost purpose is to support response time and input/output per second (IOPS)-sensitive structured data workloads. Typical use cases include mission-critical workloads. Other use cases include application consolidation, support for virtual environments, providing persistent storage for container environments and cloud IT operations.

Gartner Magic Quadrant™

The Gartner Magic Quadrant uses a uniform set of evaluation criteria and plots results on a graph to show vendors’ positioning. It classifies vendors into four categories: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players.

For more information, see Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage and Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage.