magic-quadrant-for-general-purpose-disk-arrays.pdf?WT
magic-quadrant-for-general-purpose-disk-arrays.pdf?WT
magic-quadrant-for-general-purpose-disk-arrays.pdf?WT
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Cautions<br />
■<br />
■<br />
■<br />
The lack of timely responses to competitors' new product announcements, coupled with IBM's<br />
termination of its OEM relationship with NetApp and its divestiture of its server business, has<br />
created user concerns about IBM's commitment to the <strong>disk</strong> storage business.<br />
IBM's termination of its OEM agreement with NetApp will <strong>for</strong>ce N series users to change<br />
vendors if they want to continue using NetApp technology or to convert to a new storage<br />
solution.<br />
IBM's reliance on the SVC <strong>for</strong> missing capabilities and features complicates sales cycles and<br />
adds expense and complexity to IBM storage solutions.<br />
In<strong>for</strong>trend<br />
Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, In<strong>for</strong>trend has established a successful technology innovation and<br />
financial track record providing storage technology to OEMs, system integrators (SIs), distributors<br />
and value-added resellers (VARs). Since October 2013, In<strong>for</strong>trend has placed its R&D and marketing<br />
weight behind the new EonStor DS3000 family of midrange hybrid storage <strong>arrays</strong> and away from<br />
the aging Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture (ESVA) midrange storage plat<strong>for</strong>m. While the<br />
EonStor DS3000 is appropriate <strong>for</strong> deployment as an all-<strong>purpose</strong> storage array, In<strong>for</strong>trend is placing<br />
particular marketing emphasis on applications requiring high per<strong>for</strong>mance and dense storage<br />
capacity. To augment the EonStor DS3000 hybrid storage array offering, In<strong>for</strong>trend introduced the<br />
EonNAS 3000 series in September 2013. The EonNAS 3000 series is based on open ZFS, enabling<br />
In<strong>for</strong>trend to address file-based applications as well as unified storage infrastructure opportunities.<br />
While In<strong>for</strong>trend is principally successful in penetrating the Chinese and Taiwanese markets, it is<br />
facing serious competition from China-based Huawei and Sugon. In North America, the Asia/Pacific<br />
region and Japan, In<strong>for</strong>trend employs a direct and indirect channel go-to-market strategy; while in<br />
EMEA, In<strong>for</strong>trend reaches end users via indirect channels. Publicly listed on the Taipei stock<br />
exchange, In<strong>for</strong>trend is reporting year-over-year revenue gains and positive net operating results <strong>for</strong><br />
its most recent fiscal year.<br />
Strengths<br />
■<br />
■<br />
■<br />
The EonStor DS3000 is a foundational hybrid external storage plat<strong>for</strong>m that features dual<br />
active/active controllers, with thin provisioning, automatic storage tiering, and basic snapshot<br />
and volume/copy mirroring functionality included within the price of the system.<br />
With upgraded ease-of-use features, SANWatch 3.0 is the browser-based cross-plat<strong>for</strong>m<br />
software-centralized management suite used to discover, configure, administer and monitor all<br />
In<strong>for</strong>trend block-access storage plat<strong>for</strong>ms, enabling users to mix the new EonStor DS3000 with<br />
installed ESVA infrastructures.<br />
In<strong>for</strong>trend is a small but established provider of external storage plat<strong>for</strong>ms with a global<br />
presence enabling localized sales, service and support.<br />
Page 12 of 27<br />
Gartner, Inc. | G00263357