Gartner's assessment of Hybrid & Solid-state Array Storage Systems

Gartner has assessed the capabilities of selected hybrid array & solid-state array storage systems against key use cases that are associated with primary storage workloads. 

A hybrid array is a form of hierarchical storage management that combines hard disk drives (HDDs) with solid-state drives (SSDs) for I/O speed improvements. 

Solid-state arrays are the primary external enterprise storage solution for demanding, transaction-oriented primary storage workloads associated with structured data.

Gartner projects that advancements in NAND flash and storage class memory (SCM), along with the continued adoption of NVM, are accelerating the transition from hybrid arrays to SSAs to meet demanding input/output operations per second (IOPS) and latency service-level objectives (SLOs).

Gartner has rated products from popular vendors based on the following capabilities -

Performance - the collective term that is often used to describe IOPS, bandwidth (GB/second) and response times (latency in milliseconds or microseconds per I/O) that are visible to attached servers.

Storage Efficiency - the ability of the platform to support storage efficiency technologies, such as compression, deduplication, thin provisioning and auto-tiering to improve utilization rates while reducing storage acquisition and ownership costs.

Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) - refers to a design philosophy that consistently delivers high availability by building systems with reliable components and “derating” components to increase their mean times between failures (MTBFs).

Scalability - the storage system’s ability to grow capacity, as well as performance and host connectivity. 

Ecosystem - the ability of the platform to support multiple OSs, hypervisors, third-party independent software vendors, applications (such as databases, backup/archiving products and management tools), and public cloud vendors.

Multitenancy and Security - refers to the ability of a storage system to support diverse workloads, isolate workloads from each other, and provide user access controls and auditing capabilities that log changes to the system configuration.

Manageability - refers to the automation, management, monitoring, and reporting tools and programs supported by the platform.