The market for midrange and high-end network-attached storage has become increasingly consolidated, yet still competitive, over the past year. Users should evaluate network attached storage products based on their business needs, workload characteristics and infrastructure strategy.

This document is an updated version of the Magic Quadrant published in March 2009. It's a point-in-time snapshot of vendors' positions in the market at the time of the evaluation. Therefore, it is more useful for users to evaluate the relative positions of vendors on the same chart than to compare the current position of a particular vendor with its position in the prior iteration. A small movement or no movement of a vendor's position does not indicate that the vendor has not made any progress in the past year.

Since the last iteration of this Magic Quadrant report, the midrange and high-end network attached storage (NAS) market has been consolidated with three emerging vendors acquired by three large vendors. Gartner believes that those acquisitions will be beneficial to most users, because they removed the uncertainty about the small vendors' viability and will provide more funding to further develop the innovative technologies. The market will become more competitive if the large vendors execute well with developing and promoting those technologies.

A healthy competition among different NAS platforms will also drive down the cost to the users. From a technology perspective, many vendors in the market have adopted solid state drives to boost performance. More products, such as Oracle's Sun Storage 7000 and EMC's Celerra, have introduced native deduplication or single instance store and compression (in addition to NetApp's popular deduplication capability). Deduplication is increasing its appeal in the VMware environment as well as general-purpose file serving. Another focus area for some vendors is storage tiering via migration policy engines such as BlueArc's Data Migrator and EMC's Celerra Fully Automated Storage Tiering.

In today's market, it's difficult to find one midrange or high-end NAS product that can cater to all needs. File systems embedded in NAS are often designed to solve one major pain point, with additional features being added later to broaden the use cases and benefits. Users evaluating midrange and high-end NAS products should carefully examine the pros and cons of the different architectural designs.

Users planning to consolidate Windows file servers for consolidated home directories should look for a NAS platform that has strong integration with the Microsoft environment, while users struggling to find enough bandwidth for their applications should focus on those platforms that can meet their cutting-edge performance demand. Other users who are looking for storage tiering and archiving solutions to reduce the cost of file storage should look for NAS platforms that have an embedded policy engine, or strong partnerships with archiving software vendors, to automate the storage tiering process as well as those that support deduplication and compression.

Gartner encourages users to consider taking on the risk of evaluating and potentially adopting emerging vendors. Many small vendors' key customers raved about the personal attention that they had received from the vendor's services and support staff and how fast they could resolve their technical problems. On the other hand, they also wished that the small vendors had an online knowledge portal similar to the market leaders and better diagnostic and management tools (both graphical user interface [GUI] and scripting), as well as better documentation.

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Midrange and High-End NAS Solutions


Source: Gartner (March 2010)

2009 was a turbulent year with a global financial crisis and declining IT spending. Despite the tremendous economic challenges, the midrange and high-end NAS hardware market fared rather well in 2009, with vendor revenue declining only 2% year on year – in contrast to many other IT industries, which registered more sizeable revenue declines. This favorable position was a result of two main factors: users' fast-growing unstructured file data and NAS vendors' continued innovation, such as deduplication/compression and storage tiering, to meet user requirements.

Vendor acquisition activities usually heighten during economic hard times. Three emerging NAS vendors have been acquired by large vendors in the past year. HP acquired Ibrix, LSI acquired ONStor and Dell purchased the assets of Exanet, which shut down its business at the end of 2009.

The market leader NetApp lost its NAS market share, due to its overall declining revenue year on year and its faster growing storage area network (SAN) business, although it's still holding the largest share of the midrange and high-end NAS hardware market – at 45% in 2009.

EMC's Celerra, on the other hand, has gained market share with double-digit NAS revenue growth, driven by the company's increasing focus on and users' increasing acceptance of unified NAS/SAN storage.

Isilon Systems grew its revenue by 8% as a result of broadening its technology significantly to address the horizontal storage market. Sun Microsystems, recently acquired by Oracle, has ramped up its new innovative 7000 series business quickly in 2009, becoming a challenger to the market leaders, despite the uncertain Oracle acquisition cloud overshadowing most of the year.

NAS products are specialized file server/storage systems providing file-sharing services for computing systems (clients or servers) attached to a LAN or a SAN via a NAS gateway. They use one or multiple remote file protocols, such as Network File System (NFS) for the Unix/Linux environment and Common Internet File System (CIFS) for the Windows environment. They include a file system and frequently an OS that are streamlined for file serving.

This Magic Quadrant includes only midrange and high-end NAS solutions, not low-end NAS (under $25,000 average selling price), because low-end NAS addresses different user environments with different user requirements. Gartner's definition for NAS solutions includes NAS appliances and NAS software products that can run on different hardware. A NAS appliance provides a turnkey solution that combines NAS hardware and NAS platform software. Some NAS appliances tightly integrate disk storage, while others only provide the NAS controller/engine as a gateway and leverage existing disk arrays using redundant-array-of-independent-disks technology in direct-attached or SAN-attached architecture. NAS software products include commercial network-based or storage-based file systems that have native NFS and/or CIFS support. These file systems can be based on proprietary operating system (OS) kernels or an industry-standard OS.

The inclusion of a vendor on a Magic Quadrant is determined by the authors, with input from Gartner's analyst research community. It is based on vendor-independent selection criteria and evidence that a vendor is delivering or executing in line with these criteria. A vendor has to meet all the following specific criteria for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant:

• Support a scale-up or scale-out architecture.
• Offer NFS and/or CIFS as standard client data and/or metadata access protocols.
• Provide primary file system storage, instead of storage that narrowly targets backup or archive data.
• Have an average selling price (ASP) of $25,000 or more.
• Generate annual revenue of $5 million or more.
• Have global presence in two or more large geographic markets.

Other factors that contribute to the inclusion of a vendor in the midrange and high-end NAS Magic Quadrant include:

• Market recognition, market share and revenue data.
• Client interest, as measured by the level of client inquiry received on a vendor's products, and other client feedback.
• Use of unique, unusual or interesting technology.

This report is not region-specific.

Microsoft Windows Storage Server-based NAS systems are excluded from this Magic Quadrant because the vast majority of those systems are sold with an ASP below $25,000 and compete mainly in the low end of the NAS market.

Special-purpose appliances using NFS/CIFS protocols that serve mainly as backup and archiving targets, such as Data Domain, Hitachi Content Archive Platform and NEC's HydraStor, are not included because today they mainly compete in a different market to meet user needs for intelligent backup or archiving storage. They are typically not used as a primary NAS device. Shared disk file systems and some cluster file systems running on application hosts are not included in this Magic Quadrant, because they typically require different client agents for different OSs and have limited NFS/CIFS support today. However, should the aforementioned products evolve into primary NAS solutions (such as with the adoption of parallel NFS with NFS v.4.1), they will be re-evaluated for inclusion.

Vendors that meet the Gartner criteria and are included in this Magic Quadrant are listed in alphabetical order with their products, as follows:

• BlueArc – Titan and Mercury series.
• EMC – Celerra and Multi-Path File System.
• Hitachi/Hitachi Data Systems – Hitachi NAS (H-NAS).
• HP – StorageWorks Scalable NAS, Scalable File Share, and X9000 Series.
• IBM – System Storage N series, Scale-out File System (SoFS) and Scale-out NAS (SoNAS).
• Isilon Systems – Isilon IQ Series.
• LSI – ONStor Clustered NAS Gateways.
• NetApp – FAS series and V-Series.
• Oracle – Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems.
• Panasas – ActiveStor.
• Pillar Data Systems – Axiom.
• SGI – InfiniteStorage NAS 50 and 100 and InfiniteStorage NEXIS series.

The 15 criteria used in evaluating a vendor and positioning it on the Magic Quadrant are identified and weighted in the Evaluation Criteria section. Magic Quadrants measure the current and relative strengths of vendors in the marketplace. They are not a direct measure of a product's attractiveness or a vendor's support capabilities. Therefore, using a Magic Quadrant to ease concerns about a company's long-term financial viability is reasonable; using it as the only justification in selecting a vendor or product is not. It is okay to buy from vendors that are not in the Leaders quadrant. In fact, we frequently recommend including one or more emerging storage vendor on your shortlist to gain access to innovative features and as negotiation leverage with established vendors.

LSI, which acquired ONStor.

Exanet, which closed its business at the end of 2009 with its asset acquired by Dell; Ibrix, which was acquired by HP; and ONStor.

The Ability to Execute axis highlights the change in vendor positioning directly attributable to vendor actions since the last Magic Quadrant iteration. While important, the product attribute is just one of the seven attributes evaluated by Gartner to determine a vendor's placement on the Magic Quadrant. The criteria weights used for this analysis are the same as those used for the Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays to ensure consistency and are unchanged from the 1H09 iteration of the Magic Quadrant for Midrange and High-End NAS Solutions.

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria	Weighting
Product/Service	high
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization)	high
Sales Execution/Pricing	high
Market Responsiveness and Track Record	high
Marketing Execution	high
Customer Experience	high
Operations	standard
Source: Gartner

Completeness of vision focuses on a vendor's overall potential. A vendor with average vision will anticipate and respond to change by accurately perceiving market trends and exploiting technology. However, a vendor with superior vision can anticipate, direct and initiate market trends. Therefore, a vendor that scored high on the Completeness of Vision axis does not necessarily have the most innovative product. The criteria weights used for this analysis are the same as those used for the Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays to ensure consistency and are unchanged from the 1H09 iteration of the Magic Quadrant for Midrange and High-End NAS Solutions.

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria	Weighting
Market Understanding	standard
Marketing Strategy	high
Sales Strategy	high
Offering (Product) Strategy	high
Business Model	high
Vertical/Industry Strategy	standard
Innovation	high
Geographic Strategy	standard
Source: Gartner

Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have the highest scores for their ability to execute and completeness of vision. A midrange and high-end NAS vendor in the Leaders quadrant has the market share, credibility, and marketing and sales capabilities needed to drive the acceptance of new technologies. It demonstrates understanding of market needs, is an innovator and thought leader, and has well-articulated plans that customers and prospects can use in designing their storage infrastructure and strategies.

A vendor in the Challengers quadrant participates in the broad midrange and high-end NAS market and has a competitive product portfolio and a substantial number of installations, but it lacks the vision of the vendors in the Leaders quadrant.

A midrange and high-end NAS vendor in the Visionaries quadrant often delivers uniquely innovative products that address operationally or financially important end-user problems, but has not demonstrated the ability to capture substantial market share or sustainable profitability. Visionary vendors are frequently emerging companies and acquisition targets for larger established companies. The likelihood of acquisition often reduces the risks associated with installing their systems.

Vendors in the Niche Players quadrant could be focusing on specific market segments, such as high-performance computing (HPC), that are generally underpenetrated by the larger vendors. This quadrant also includes vendors that may have innovative products but are still ramping up their overall go-to-market efforts and have yet to develop the vision or the execution to break out of the Niche Players quadrant.

Strengths

• BlueArc's Titan product is a high-end NAS system with high performance, file system scalability and modular upgrades, supporting LSI, HDS and DataDirect Networks' storage arrays in the back end. Its well-rounded feature set includes a policy-based data migration tool for storage tiering within the system, virtual filer with automated failover, and a common namespace spanning eight nodes. In 2009, major enhancements included Microsoft SMB v2 support, improvement in file system and metadata recovery mechanisms, multi-stream replication and dynamic write balancing.
• In 2009, BlueArc launched a slimmed-down midrange Mercury system, which supports all features run on its high-end Titan, but offers a much more affordable price. The midrange product has achieved initial market traction and expanded the company's footprint to a broader market and applications. BlueArc formed another OEM relationship with SGI recently in addition to its healthy OEM relationship with HDS, which is also a minority owner. It has a successful partner relationship with deduplication appliance company Ocarina.
• BlueArc revamped its marketing initiatives in 2009, which focus more on its value propositions against business problems and to appeal more to a broader audience in the wider market it is targeting.

Cautions

• BlueArc's revenue in 2009 partially declined, reflecting the gloomy economy and IT spending.
• BlueArc has not developed a strong presence in the VMware environment and Windows file server consolidation market due to its historical focus on the high-performance environment, as well as Titan's high prices and limited channels.
• Customers of BlueArc commented that it needs to create an online knowledge portal for customers, improve the usefulness of the graphical user interface and enhance system analytical capability.

Strengths

• The EMC Celerra series offers good reliability and predictable performance when configured with a hot standby. In the last couple of years, EMC has made significant improvements to increase its functionality and ease of use regarding setup and storage provisioning replication. In 2009, EMC added compression with file-based deduplication and Celerra Fully Automated Storage Tiering, a product leveraging Rainfinity technology to provide internal Celerra storage tiering and external tiering to another Celerra, a Centera or an Atmos (as well as Data Domain in 2010). EMC also added many vertical application partners for its Multi-Path File System (MPFS), a SAN shared file system, to expand its presence in verticals that need higher performance than NFS.
• EMC launched effective marketing campaigns and aggressive sales initiatives to promote sales of Celerra. As a result, EMC drove high growth of its midrange and high-end Celerra hardware business in 2009 with a 36% growth rate despite the economic downturn, gaining market share.
• EMC deepened the Celerra integration with VMware in 2009, including a failback plug-in for VMware SRM 4.0 with NFS and iSCSI support, Storage Replication Adapter for Celerra Replicator with NFS, and Replication Manager for VMware on NFS.

Cautions

• Customers have expressed their opinions that EMC should provide tighter integration between Celerra management and back-end storage array management and continue to improve its user interface functions.
• Celerra's current 16TB file system limitation cannot meet the environments with numerous large files. The MPFS shared SAN file system has yet to achieve significant commercial success.
• EMC's NAS gateways support only EMC-branded back-end storage.

Strengths

• High performance, scalable capacity, fully developed data services, policy-based file tiering, single global namespace and large volume/file system size represent distinguishing HDS H-NAS characteristics that meet the needs of the midsize enterprise NAS market appropriately.
• The seamless interoperability between the new H-NAS 3080 and 3090 midrange NAS platforms with the proven high-end H-NAS 3100 and 3200 NAS platforms, clearly enhances HDS's competitive posture as a credible provider of file-access storage solutions, yet according to Gartner research, NAS revenue remains small.
• Integrated with the Hitachi Storage Command Suite storage management software the H-NAS represents a particularly attractive NAS solution in accounts that have deployed or will deploy HDS USPV, USPNV and AMS storage platforms. HDS has done an effective job of integrating H-NAS, HCP and the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS) to provide bidirectional data migration (file tiering) and content-aware index, search and some policy management across H-NAS and HCP platforms.

Cautions

• While users are satisfied with H-NAS general support, HDS needs to expand the size and strengthen the technical knowledge of its H-NAS pre-sale and post-sales teams to improve responsive support for clients that are implementing sophisticated high-availability NAS infrastructures.
• Sourced from BlueArc the product attractiveness of the HDS H-NAS platform is dependent on privately held BlueArc's ability to develop the core features and functions in a timely manner to keep the H-NAS product competitive.
• Users report that the documentation regarding disaster recovery (DR) procedures is very technical and more appropriate for advanced users; and that a background in Unix is helpful when installing a DR infrastructure.

Strengths

• The new HP StorageWorks X9000 is based on Ibrix file system, acquired by HP in August 2009. It replaces the PolyServe-based 9100 Extreme Data Storage System with higher performance scalability and continues to target the vertical industries that require high performance and capacity scalability with relative low cost such as media and life science. The PolyServe technology will continue to be sold for SQL consolidation.
• The Ibrix file system is a scale-out, switch-like virtual file system aggregating each commodity node within a common namespace cluster with parallel metadata access. The Ibrix solution can handle both random and sequential workloads and both large and small input/outputs (I/Os) and offers automated data tiering.
• HP is leveraging its market-leading industry-standard x86 server and blade technologies for its NAS hardware platform to drive down the cost of NAS solutions and pave the foundation for a future unified storage platform.

Cautions

• HP has changed its previous strategy and will now use Ibrix instead of PolyServe to create a full capability NAS line. It is discontinuing its PolyServe-based NAS gateways and appliances in 2010, leaving a gap in its midrange NAS portfolio for general-purpose file services and consolidation. The X9000 NAS system is not ready to fill in the gap today and needs more R&D to boost features and functions. HP has promised that it will announce a transition plan for existing customers.
• HP's midrange and high-end NAS solution revenue decreased 30% in 2009 while the overall NAS market has declined slightly.
• A significant part of the Ibrix business before the HP acquisition came from its reseller relationships with HP competitors Dell and EMC. HP has terminated these relationships, but will support existing customers.

Strengths

• IBM has acquired the No. 3 slot for revenue market-share in midrange and high-end NAS. IBM's primary NAS offering is the rebranded N series from NetApp, which gives IBM the competitive advantages provided by NetApp's unified storage architecture and its comprehensive data management software suite.
• IBM's second and different NAS offering is Scale out File Services (SoFS), based on its proven General Parallel File System (GPFS), and adds product integration and services to deliver global namespace NAS deployments at a scale beyond the capabilities of most, if not all, of the other NAS products in the market. Scale-Out NAS (SoNAS), announced in February 2010, is an appliance-like configuration of the product without the services. In 2009 IBM announced that both its public and private cloud offerings would be based on SoNAS.
• As a large portfolio company, IBM can and often does bundle its NAS products with other storage, server, software and service products, yielding a financially attractive capital expenditure (capex) package to its customers.

Cautions

• The maturity of IBM N series field technical support capability is improving but varies by territory and geographic region. Customers occasionally may face longer times to solve technical issues, because they first have to go through the IBM service and support system. This can be offset by IBM's broader perspective on a client issue that crosses servers, network, storage and software.
• IBM and NetApp generally manage their relationship to the benefit of the customer, but they still occasionally encounter sales and channel conflict, causing unnecessary ambiguity about best choice. When there is no bid competition, the IBM N series pricing model is likely to result in a higher capex offering than experienced in competitive bids.
• The professional services included in IBM's SoFS are effective in hiding many complexity issues associated with GPFS, but most of the broad customer base would be challenged by the product without the services. The market has yet to validate IBM's claim that the new SoNAS offering solves this issue.

Strengths

• Isilon offers scale-out NAS clusters that can increase seamlessly a single file system or volume into petabytes of capacity, tens of GBs per second of throughput and over 1 million I/Os per second (IOPS) performance with up to 144 nodes. Its OneFS file system offers advanced and flexible protection schemes and fast, parallel disk rebuild with no need for hot spare disk drives. In 2009, Isilon launched three new product lines (the S-Series for high transaction workload, the NL-Series for nearline archive and the Backup Accelerator for direct backup to tape). Most recently, Isilon introduced solid state drives (SSDs) in its cluster nodes for metadata-intensive applications. Those new products have significantly broadened Isilon's appeal in the horizontal market.
• The ease of implementing, managing and growing Isilon scale-out NAS results in high business efficiency with little or no change in administrators' time when storage grows.
• Despite challenging economic conditions in 2009, Isilon managed to grow its revenue by 8% to $124 million and customer base to 1,200 customers. In the fourth quarter of 2009, it achieved profitability. It has significantly expanded its footprint in the VMware environment and formed partnerships with all major backup software vendors.

Cautions

• Isilon has penetrated many verticals beyond its traditionally strong foothold in media/entertainment, such as life science, Internet cloud services, government and manufacturing, but Isilon's brand awareness is still quite low in the horizontal storage market. The company still has a lot more to do to broadcast its success with horizontal applications such as VMware.
• Isilon's scale-out NAS needs to improve its storage efficiency with many small-file workloads, such as with Oracle database applications.
• The company is partnering with Ocarina and Storwize for deduplication and compression, but customers would prefer native in-line deduplication function from Isilon.

LSI Logic is new to the NAS market, but is well known as a storage block array OEM supplier to IBM, Sun, HP, SGI, and others.
Strengths

• LSI acquired ONStor in August 2009, mostly eliminating user's concerns about the ongoing financial viability of ONStor. It indicates that it has doubled engineering investment and intends to continue selling to and supporting existing ONStor customers.
• ONStor's NAS architecture is a combination of scale-up and scale-out with a focus on file server consolidation. Its stand-alone NAS and NAS gateways stand out with their agile virtual file servers for cross-node failover and load balancing with user transparency. Other notable features include a scalable file system for each node, high rack density and power efficiency, and a global namespace that unites eight nodes of ONStor's systems and Windows file servers.
• In 2009, the ONStor product's performance increased to 800 MB/sec, 100K NFS IOPS per filer, and LSI ONStor Reporter was introduced to deliver automated reporting and highly customizable, centralized report views across both physical and virtual storage resources.

Cautions

• LSI will not invest in development of sales or channels directed to end users, preferring instead to support its OEM partners in their channels.
• LSI indicates that it will move the ONStor technology into its existing block storage line to meet the needs of its OEM tier 1 customers; we note that those vendor customers all have existing NAS programs that compete with ONStor.
• The ONStor product represents only a small part of the NAS market and showed a definite loss of momentum in 2009, as it struggled both with the economic environment and its own financial issues.

Strengths

• With its mature product, rich features and a wide "ecosystem," NetApp remains a strong leader in terms of midrange and high-end NAS revenue market share, despite losing share in 2009. Gartner surveys show that NetApp's FAS storage systems provide a high degree of user satisfaction with regard to value received and simplifying the storage infrastructure.
• NetApp in 2009 introduced enhancements, innovations, and extensions to its NAS capabilities and its integration with applications, platforms, and partners. Highlights include: the Performance Acceleration Module (PAM-II), which uses flash in a more effective way than SSDs; the Rapid Cloning Utility, which allows administrators to deploy hundreds of new virtual machines in minutes without taking any incremental space; and several model upgrades offering higher performance and scale than previous models.
• NetApp sets the standard for strong integration of applications with its NAS capabilities and has been aggressive in introducing plug-in and API support for recently introduced VMware 4.0. Its native deduplication is the most widely deployed such capability in the market.

Cautions

• Final integration of ONTAP GX (ONTAP 8.1) still remains a work in process, allowing smaller competitors whose standard products are based on cluster file systems to open competitive gaps.
• NetApp's value-based pricing model is causing it to gain a reputation as a high-priced vendor, especially in the lower half of the market where it is challenged by competitors like Sun. NetApp has tried to address this issue by bundling software for the FAS 2000; however, Gartner does not believe that it has made significant difference in customer perception.
• Most user complaints about NetApp's products stem from operational complexity caused by the existing file system limit of 16TB associated with the widely deployed ONTAP 7G, which causes users to create manual workarounds. ONTAP 8-7 Mode fixed the issue with 100TB aggregates, but many customers are not migrating to the ONTAP 8-7 Mode, instead waiting for the ONTAP 8.1.

Strengths

• Scalable performance and capacity coupled with broad data services support, value-based pricing and the introduction of SSDs, along with native in-line deduplication positions Oracle's Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage system as a strong competitive alternative in the general-purpose file sharing NAS market where 24/7 (99.999%) availability is not required.
• The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System can simultaneously support file-and block-access protocols helping to simplify an organization's storage infrastructure which improves total cost of ownership.
• The embedded DTrace Analytics is a highly granular and robust management tool that users report as being very helpful in isolating and resolving problems, as well as analyzing the capacity and performance of the system down to the user level and impact on the network.

Cautions

• As Oracle's Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System firmware continues to mature, expect frequent firmware upgrade releases, which, depending on the nature of the firmware upgrade and the configuration, may be disruptive.
• Noting that Oracle has now completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, some users reported spotty customer support for the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System as Sun's financial position deteriorated during the extended government review period.
• The Sun Storage 7000's snapshot management integration is limited to VMware Site Recovery Manager and with Microsoft Volume Shadow Services for CIFS today.

Strengths

• Panasas is a well-know brand in the HPC environment with large Linux clusters, most notably in the oil/gas, high-tech manufacturing and government labs. Its ActiveStor is a scale-out storage cluster that offers parallel data access for high bandwidth. Its object-based file system provides fast disk rebuild and more granularity than traditional file systems. In 2009, the company added SSDs to boost performance for metadata and small files and introduced heterogeneous remote replication based on Bakbone technology.
• The Panasas systems continue to appeal to customers through their high performance, the ease of implementation and management, as well as data integrity and system reliability. In some cutting-edge environments that require extremely high bandwidth, Panasas is often one of the very few viable solutions available in the market.
• Panasas enhanced its channel partnerships and increased channel sales to 50% of the company revenue in 2009. Despite the economic downturn in 2009, Panasas grew its revenue with a double-digit growth rate.

Cautions

• Panasas' ActiveStor has very low presence in the broader, horizontal storage market. The company has not partnered with major horizontal application vendors such as VMware or Oracle.
• Panasas' ActiveStor is rarely used in the Windows environment as a general-purpose enterprise NAS system for Windows file server consolidation.
• Although Panasas offers an innovative vertical parity protection to extend data protection beyond simple RAID 5, it's still developing a true RAID 6 support for data protection against two simultaneous drive failures.

Strengths

• The Pillar Axiom is a unified multiprotocol storage system that can simultaneously support file- and block-access applications on a common platform resulting in lower infrastructure and management costs compared to purpose-built storage systems.
• Ease of use, 99.999% of unplanned up time availability, scalable performance and capacity, optimized utilization, inclusive data services, global name space, and attractive pricing are the highlights of the Pillar Data Axiom storage system in a NAS infrastructure.
• Scaled to match its business plan and geographic reach, Pillar's pre-sale and post-sale technical support personnel are well-qualified to assist customers in designing and supporting complex NAS infrastructures.

Cautions

• Pillar Data is a privately held company, and users need to take into consideration the lack of financial transparency when evaluating Pillar Data.
• The availability of Pillar's Axiom-based replication software is an important enhancement; however, this newly developed code requires market validation to confirm its completeness of function and maturity. The Pillar Axiom does not currently provide support for RAID 6 or data deduplication.
• Focusing on a unified multiprotocol product positioning and messaging strategy, Pillar does not have a high profile in the pure NAS market.

Strengths

• The newly released SGI InfiniteStorage NAS 50 and NAS 100 gateways (sourced from BlueArc) target applications that require enterprise features such as snapshot and replication. They feature high-performance at midrange pricing, inclusive file-access protocols, iSCSI block-access protocol, global namespace, automated data tiering, active/active clustering and controller-based snapshots and replication functionality. The NAS 50 and NAS 100 platforms can be deployed into infrastructures with existing external disk storage systems as a gateway to support applications requiring file access or integrated with one of SGI's InfiniteStorage RAID storage systems.
• The span of the SGI InfiniteStorage NAS product portfolio enables it to serve the diverse needs of the midrange to high-end NAS market with fully integrated stand-alone systems or with NAS gateway solutions that provide flexibility in back-end disk storage selection.
• SGI's NFS solution based on its XFS file system differentiates itself by offering Infiniband host connection. The XFS-based solutions are targeted mainly at high-performance computing environments where customers care more about price/performance and price/capacity metrics. SGI is now supporting those solutions with its entire back-end storage arrays.

Cautions

• The absence of sustained profitability represents a business risk that users should consider when evaluating SGI InfiniteStorage NAS solutions.
• SGI must depend on privately held BlueArc to develop the necessary features and functions in a timely manner to keep the InfiniteStorage NAS 50 and NAS 100 platforms competitive.
• SGI has not been a strong name brand in the horizontal, general-purpose NAS market; its market share has been small as well.

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms
ASP	average selling price
Capex	capital expenditure
CIFS	Common Internet File System
ExDS9100	HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System
FPGA	field-programmable gate array
HPC	high-performance computing
I/O	input/output
MPFS	EMC Multi-Path File System
NAS	network-attached storage
NFS	network file system
OS	operating system
SAN	storage area network
SATA	Serial AT Attachment
SoFS	IBM Scale out File Services
SoNAS	IBM Scale out Network Attached Storage

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor. Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills, etc., whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood of the individual business unit to continue investing in the product, to continue offering the product and to advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all pre-sales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, pre-sales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional, thought leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements, etc. Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the Web site, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling product that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature set as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.