Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Published 17 September 2019 - ID G00394522 - 42 min read Next-generation primary storage arrays are being shaped by technologies such as NVMe, integration with public clouds and AIOps. I&O leaders must view future primary storage array investments as foundational to modernization and digital business transformation. Market Definition/Description The Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage covers vendors that offer dedicated products or product lines for solid-state arrays (SSAs), hybrid storage arrays or both. Hybrid storage arrays include both solid-state drive (SSD) and hard-disk drive (HDD) devices in their configurations. SSA products are 100% solid-state-technology-based systems that cannot be combined or expanded with any form of HDD. The Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage replaces two Magic Quadrants: the Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays and the Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Storage Arrays. Refer to “Gartner Revamps Storage Research With New Primary Storage Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities Research” for more information. This Magic Quadrant does not include companies participating in secondary/unstructured storage markets; for more details see “Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage” and “Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions.”This Magic Quadrant does not evaluate vendor financial performance and product families that were made generally available after 31 May 2019. A primary storage array’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, mainstream database workloads and in-house-developed transactional applications. Other use cases include consolidation of virtualized applications, analytics, high-performance computing (HPC) and providing persistent storage for container environments. Primary storage platforms provide a broad library of data services that conserve capacity utilization, protect against data loss, and enhance recovery via local and remote replication. The architecture can be scale -up or scale-out. Host interface protocols can be block-based (Fibre Channel, iSCSI), file-based (Network File System, Server Message Block), or a combination of block and file protocols. For SSAs, the host interface may also be nonvolatile memory express over fabrics (NVMe-oF). Magic Quadrant Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Source: Gartner (September 2019) 1 Vendor Strengths and Cautions DDN DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a provider of external enterprise storage platforms designed to support workloads that require high-transactional performance and fast-bandwidth capabilities. The proven Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) family, the core of DDN’s storage portfolio, consists of solid-state array and hybrid array offerings, enabling it to cost-effectively address a range of use cases. Its acquisition of Tintri in September 2018 further extends its portfolio and provides DDN with a competitive enterprise storage platform designed specifically to support virtualized workloads. Since DDN acquired Tintri, it has made investments in R&D and client support to reassure the user base that Tintri will remain a credible platform for its IT infrastructure. DDN updated and further expanded its SFA portfolio in 2018 and early 2019. It introduced the SFA18K and SFA7990 hybrid systems, positioned as replacements of SFA14KX and SFA7700 respectively. It also announced two new solid-state arrays — SFA200NV and SFA400NV, both of which support internal NVMe drives. DDN also released A I, an integrated system solution in partnership with NVIDIA and Hewlett 3 Packard Enterprise (HPE), positioned for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) workloads. 2 DDN continues to rely on specialist independent software vendors (ISVs) that position its products for specific vertical industries such as retail, healthcare, automotive, life sciences and energy. It continues to strengthen its partnership with various server, networking and backup vendors in order to provide end-to-end solutions to its customers. Gartner’s clients expressed a high level of satisfaction with performance and reliability of the SFA series, particularly for HPC workloads. Strengths  DDN is a preferred storage vendor for customers deploying performance-intensive, petabyte-scale AI/ML, HPC and big data analytics projects.  DDN’s S