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Executive Summary
This Neuralytix iQ report evaluates the technology portfolios of ten (10) object storage vendors (all of whom are members of the Object Storage Alliance [OSA]). With the exception of EMC, which requested Neuralytix to provide data on its behalf based on our own research, the data for this report was tabulated based on vendor submissions.
Neuralytix accepted these answers as bona fide responses, but we validated all claims prior to publication.
The marketplace for object storage has accelerated dramatically over the last several years.
This report analyzes the portfolio of technologies owned by a given vendor, and is not reflective in any way of their market performance, any specific markets in which they participate, and absolutely in no way is it a product comparison.
Unique to Neuralytix is the absence of ordinal rankings, despite using a scoring system. This Object Storage iQ is illustrative of why rankings give a completely skewed view of the market. The two vendors listed as Visionaries in our results differed by only two points.
While one vendor offers proprietary cloud capacity, another has a more mature product. One vendor offers more access protocols than the other. However, despite the two point difference, Neuralytix’s assessment is that both solutions offer a very similar set of features, functions, support for third-party integration and scalability to address the needs of the modern enterprise.
Instead of an ordinal ranking system, Neuralytix groups vendors into one of three categories. It is our considered opinion that ordinal rankings does not properly represent the similarities between vendors, but artificially suggest that one vendor is decidedly better than another, when the differences are very likely to be marginal.
The participants in this study were Amplidata, China Telecom, Cleversafe, Cloudian, DataDirect, EMC, HDS, HP, NetApp and Quantum.
The results are listed in Table 1. In each category, vendors are listed alphabetically.
Neuralytix placed a very high emphasis on the ability of a vendor to integrate third-party storage systems into the object storage solution. This emphasis is borne from our research that suggests end-user customers want to evolve their storage solutions from traditional DAS, SAN, and NAS to object storage, but do not want to be put in a position where they have to give up existing investments.
Cleversafe self-reported that they do not support third-party storage systems. Despite their claims to the contrary, Neuralytix was unable to validate this assertion.
Neuralytix plans to publish updates of this Object Storage iQ on a regular basis. For this reason, we emphasize that our assessment is a temporal one, and that from quarter to quarter, year to year, those vendors categorized as Up and Coming or Promising can quickly progress to a higher rating based on new acquisitions and inclusions into their portfolios.
We would also note that while China Telecom and EMC are recognized by Neuralytix as Visionary in the 2015 object storage market, these two vendors need to understand that the Up and Coming and Promising vendors are not too far behind them.
In the end, using a normal (Gaussian) distribution, six vendors were classified as Promising, with the balance designated as Up and Coming.
[1] EMC elected not to respond formally to our research request. However, EMC allowed Neuralytix to make its own assessment independent of EMC.
[2] Cleversafe respectfully disagrees with Neuralytix’s assessment of our capability with respect to 3rd party integration. Cleversafe has large customers in production with our software running their 3rd party hardware. Our documented strategy and capabilities are to deliver the most scalable, reliable and secure object storage system and enable customers to choose the hardware platform on which they will operate, thus enabling them to utilize the hardware they have to start their build out of their web-scale, object storage environment as they progress, yet Neuralytix did not consider these capabilities in their assessment.
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