IDC MarketScape

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2018

Vendor Assessment
Amita Potnis

THIS IDC MARKETSCAPE EXCERPT FEATURES NETAPP

IDC MARKETSCAPE FIGURE

FIGURE 1

IDC MarketScape Worldwide Object-Based Storage Vendor Assessment

Source: IDC, 2018

Please see the Appendix for detailed methodology, market definition, and scoring criteria.

June 2018, IDC #US42665518e

IDC OPINION

In IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2016 Vendor Assessment (IDC #US41918416,
December 2016), we stated that the problems of storing and managing unstructured data are not going
away. This remains true in 2018. According to File- and Object-Based Storage Survey Findings, 2017:
Adoption and Workloads Trends — Part 1 (IDC #US43630018, March 2018), more than 50% of the 450
respondents adopted object-based storage (OBS) because existing NAS was too complex to manage.
More than 40% of the respondents also indicated that scalability was a major concern for their
organizations given the ever-growing data sets. Organizations large and small are now aware of the
advantages of OBS and the flexibility of offerings of this technology. As adoption of OBS continues to
increase, much of the feature functions are now standard across products. Examples of such features
are S3 compatibility, erasure coding, replication, and custom metadata. IDC believes that the OBS
market segment has reached a maturity point, and going forward the strategic vision in terms of
partnerships with public cloud providers, file system capabilities, a portfolio of diverse solutions that
support a variety of use cases across verticals, and so forth will play a strategic role in market
penetration. Based on several customer interviews, IDC expects OBS will take a more prominent role
in production workloads and this is where the OBS suppliers will see growth.

In this IDC MarketScape, IDC assesses the present commercial OBS supplier (suppliers that deliver
software-defined OBS solutions as software or appliances much like other storage platforms)
landscape. Cloud-based storage services based on OBS are not included in this IDC MarketScape.
Since the publication of the last OBS IDC MarketScape, the landscape has changed dramatically — a
fragmented OBS market has now somewhat consolidated. As demand for traditional external storage
systems continues to decline, several mainstream storage suppliers enhanced their portfolio to include
OBS solutions by developing them in-house or via acquisitions. This IDC MarketScape assesses 13
OBS suppliers that are "owners of intellectual property (IP)."

IDC believes that going forward, the longevity and success of any OBS supplier lie in its strategy and
road map. Today, there is a definitive shift to compete together as opposed to commercial OBS
suppliers competing against public cloud. In recent months, several OBS suppliers (listed in this IDC
MarketScape) have partnered with public cloud storage service providers to support end users'
multicloud initiatives as well as a wider range of workloads. Therefore, IDC would like its readers to
note that this IDC MarketScape gives additional weight to strategy than capability. In earlier IDC
MarketScapes, strategy and capability criteria carried equal weightage. When considering an OBS
solution, IDC recommends that end users look for the following capabilities and business strategies of
OBS suppliers that are representative of the market:

▪ Security: What data would move to the OBS platform, and what kind of security services does
the potential product support (encryption, user authentication, protection against ransomware,
unforeseen events, etc.)?
▪ Multicloud strategy initiatives: Does the commercial OBS solution support your organization's
multicloud initiative by supporting data tiering to public cloud? Is data moved in native format
supported by the public cloud, or does it need to be accessed through the OBS solution's
proprietary interface?
▪ Performance: Will the OBS solution support higher performance needs for specific production
workloads? More specifically, does it support file access protocols (NFS and SMB) natively via
a file system?

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 ▪ Information life-cycle management (ILM): Does the OBS solution support a robust set of ILM
policies — not just for on-premises deployments but also in the public cloud/tape or optical
media?
▪ Cost: Does the OBS solution lend itself to lower capex or opex, and will it sustain cost savings
in a 5- to 10-year period?

IDC MARKETSCAPE VENDOR INCLUSION CRITERIA

This IDC study assesses the capabilities and business strategies of key suppliers in the (scale-out)
OBS market segment — which is part of the overall file- and object-based storage market. This
evaluation is based on a comprehensive framework and a set of parameters that gauge the success of
a supplier in delivering an OBS solution in the market. This study includes analysis of 13 notable
players in the commercial OBS market, with broader portfolios and global scale. The suppliers enlisted
in this study are (in alphabetical order) Caringo, Cloudian Inc., Cohesity, Dell EMC, Hitachi Data
Systems (HDS), IBM, NetApp, Red Hat, Scality, StorageCraft, SUSE, SwiftStack, and Western Digital
(WD).

To make this list, the suppliers need to have an OBS platform that:

▪ Conforms to IDC's taxonomy on OBS platforms. According to IDC's taxonomy, software-based

OBS platforms can run on any commodity x86 platforms and do not have any specific
hardware customizations (like custom ASICs or SoCs) mated to the software stack, and they
leverage an OBS data organization scheme.
▪ Has been developed in-house or owned by way of an acquisition. In other words, the supplier
needs to be the intellectual property owner of that platform.
▪ Is delivered as software, hardware (appliance or gateway), and/or as (private or public) cloud
based. Additional points were granted to solutions supporting data tiering to and from public
clouds through a simple intuitive UI as well as those that supported search and data analytics
reporting capabilities.
▪ Is sold as licensed software directly to buyers or indirectly via OEM/channel partners and not
just as a service. Additional points were granted if the supplier had partnerships with as-a-
service providers to deliver it as a cloud offering.
▪ Was generally available (GA) as a current offering at the time IDC undertook this study in early
2018 with revenue of $20 million+.
This study is designed to evaluate each supplier for its OBS offering as opposed to the breadth of
products and services of the firm. In other words, it should be observed that this study evaluates each
participating supplier as an entity within the OBS market.

In addition, some suppliers did not make the list because they did not meet one or more of the
selection criteria. The supplier that gets an honorable mention in this study is DataDirect Networks.
Other suppliers in adjunct markets such as data protection are also mentioned.

Please see the "Reading an IDC MarketScape Graph" section for more details on how market share
was calculated for vendors with multiple product offerings and delivery modes.

©2018 IDC #US42665518e 3

ADVICE FOR TECHNOLOGY BUYERS

As end users move toward a hybrid cloud/multicloud storage strategy to support the needs of their
ever-increasing data sets while supporting traditional and next-generation workloads, IDC urges you to
think about the following when choosing OBS solutions:

▪ Automated information life-cycle management (ILM): Policy-driven ILM capabilities that enable
management, repair, and deletion of data will help increase efficiency when managing
petabyte- or exabyte-scale data sets.
▪ Solutions portfolio: A strong technology (hardware and software) partnership portfolio lends
itself to a given OBS offering being able to support many use cases across verticals. An OBS
supplier with several ISV and server-hardware partnerships provides end users the ease of
procuring and deploying solutions in a quick and efficient manner.
▪ Data access: A flexible OBS solution will allow native data access capability for files and
objects where data can be stored or accessed as file or objects or native public cloud format.
▪ Data tiering: Data can be tiered to multiple public cloud storage services while being managed
through a single pane of glass giving customers choice and ease of management to use the
right platforms for their workloads.
▪ Ability to support production workloads: OBS solutions are slowly but surely being deployed
for production use cases. As customers look at OBS solutions, it is imperative that they
consider solutions that can support the performance, bandwidth, scale, and other
requirements of production workloads.

VENDOR SUMMARY PROFILE

This section briefly explains IDC's key observations resulting in a vendor's position in the IDC
MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria outlined in the Appendix,
the description here provides a summary of the vendor's strengths and challenges.

NetApp
NetApp is positioned as a Leader in this IDC MarketScape for object-based storage.

NetApp's entry in the OBS space, with its offering — NetApp StorageGRID — is via acquisition. Since
its introduction in 2014, NetApp has made strides in improving and expanding the capabilities of
NetApp StorageGRID. Today, NetApp's OBS is a part of the company's Cloud Infrastructure business
unit that includes its hyperconverged, converged, and Active IQ offerings. The product is available as
either an appliance or a software-only offering and offers enterprise-grade attributes such as client
connectivity via known protocols (NFS/CIFS, cloud protocols like S3 and Swift), massive scale, global
namespace across sites, comprehensive and automated ILM/dynamic policy management, flexible
data protection methods (replication and erasure coding), fault-tolerant architecture, security, audit
capabilities, and integration with cloud and archiving solutions.

In recent times, NetApp StorageGRID has made significant improvements to its integrated ILM
functionality by providing controlled data placement and accessing policies by region using location
constraint and updates to GUI for ease of use. The product also supports a new public metrics API that
enables users to extract value from metrics collected at the node and service level for better insights.
StorageGRID Cloud Tiering and Cloud Mirroring support data tiering to S3-compatible public clouds. It
supports metadata search, reporting, and visualization integration across on-premises and cloud

©2018 IDC #US42665518e 4

deployments via the Elastic Stack. Search is also enabled for policy management via the product's ILM
framework. StorageGRID now provides cloud-architected infrastructure for financial and personal data
retention compliance as one integrated resource across public and private clouds.

As NetApp StorageGRID evolves in its functionality, it has developed a portfolio of offerings to better
address the needs of the market. For example, NetApp StorageGRID NAS Bridge, the company's self-
built cloud gateway, supports NAS protocols where files can be ingested as SMB or NFS or as objects
via S3, targeted primarily at ROBO and archive use cases. NetApp's Fabric Pool allows customers the
choice of leveraging Data ONTAP's file capabilities while tiering data to NetApp StorageGRID. In
addition, NetApp's AltaVault and StorageGRID provide optimized solutions with file capabilities for
backup and archive applications.

Strengths
The strength of NetApp comes in the form of its core engineering strengths and its vast experience in
the unstructured data space. NetApp has made strides in bringing to market new products across
market segments and partnership with hyperscale cloud storage service providers Microsoft Azure and
Amazon AWS. The company's strategic vision to recognize the needs of the market and the
willingness to drive effective change within its organization to align to its vision are commendable. With
these changes, NetApp StorageGRID is a part of a broader integrated portfolio offering that makes it
an attractive proposition to customers.

Challenges
In recent times, NetApp has increased its focus on new high-growth segments of the market such as
all-flash arrays and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Although NetApp continues to invest in
engineering efforts to harden its OBS product, the company will need to focus on highlighting the value
and advantages of NetApp StorageGRID to gain mindshare and market share. Therefore, NetApp's
StorageGRID's biggest challenge is that of brand recognition in the OBS space.

APPENDIX

Reading an IDC MarketScape Graph

For the purposes of this analysis, IDC divided potential key measures for success into two primary
categories: capabilities and strategies.

Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor's current capabilities and menu of services and how well
aligned the vendor is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the capabilities of the
company and product today, here and now. Under this category, IDC analysts will look at how well a
vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.

Positioning on the x-axis, or strategies axis, indicates how well the vendor's future strategy aligns with
what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level
decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-
market plans for the next three to five years.

The size of the individual vendor markers in the IDC MarketScape represents the market share of each
individual vendor within the specific market segment being assessed.

©2018 IDC #US42665518e 5

In the case of a supplier with multiple products in the same market segment, IDC has worked with the
supplier to select the product that most closely resembles the tactical strengths (capabilities) and
strategic directions (strategies) of the supplier and the one that can be used as the lens through which
the supplier's position in the market can be ascertained, provided the product meets the inclusion
criteria for the IDC MarketScape. This can impact the size of the bubble as only the revenue for the
evaluated product is included and not the supplier's overall revenue for that market segment.

Therefore, while certain suppliers are at an advantage given their size and broader portfolio offerings,
IDC recognizes that smaller suppliers with a single product, and whose primary focus in the object-
based storage market may be limited to specific verticals, also play an important role by bringing to
market potentially disruptive technologies.

Note that certain suppliers (e.g., Scality and Red Hat) are pure-play software vendors, while the other
suppliers sell a mix of hardware and software, mostly as hardware appliances. Pure-play software
typically represents 25–50% of the total revenue, so associated server revenue is added to compare
the size of the bubbles directly to the appliance vendors.

IDC MarketScape Methodology

IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC
judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard
characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and
interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user
interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual
vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and
interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to
provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor's characteristics, behavior, and
capability.

Market Definition
According to Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Forecast, 2016–2020 (IDC #US41685816,
September 2016), object-based storage capacity is expected to grow at a CAGR of 30.7% for 2016–
2020, reaching 293.7EB in 2020.

IDC classifies OBS platforms as part of the scale-out file- and OBS (FOBS) market segment. IDC uses
the classification scheme to classify newer software-based file- and object-based storage platforms.

Scale-out FOBS refers to FOBS solutions that use a distributed data placement mechanism to span
multiple independent server hosts or controllers while presenting a single data access namespace.
Such architectures are also called shared nothing (or sharded data) architectures. Such architectures
allow for flexible scalability in performance and capacity independent of each other using commodity
components. Data sharding and distribution mechanisms (such as local and geographic replication
and local and distributed erasure coding) account for one or more concurrent component failures.
Scale-out FOBS solutions are made up of two variants: scale-out FBS solutions and scale-out OBS
solutions. There are two principal differences between the two types: how data is organized, and how
data is accessed.

Scale-out FBS solutions use distributed file systems with hierarchical structures to organize and store
data. These structures are akin to mechanisms used by monolithic file systems, which in most cases
follow a root directory (folder) and inverted tree structure. In contrast, scale-out OBS solutions use flat

©2018 IDC #US42665518e 6

structures to organize data. Such structures are higher-level structures in which data is often organized
using an "account, container, object" approach wherein "objects" are analogous to "files" in FBS
solutions. Accounts, containers, and objects are referenced by a metadata repository that stores and
manages attributes of data stored in that structure. The level at which OBS solutions operate varies
from platform to platform. Many OBS solutions operate on a per-object level (i.e., allow each object to
be treated independently as far as policy management is concerned), whereas others operate at a
container or account level (i.e., only allow policies to be applied at a container or account level).
Several OBS solutions also leverage NoSQL databases as metadata repositories and persistent data
stores (instead of storing chunks in the file systems).

Because of the need to manage objects with a comprehensive set of attributes, most OBS solutions
use a different set of data interfaces than their FBS counterparts that mostly leverage NFS, SMB
(CIFS), or FTP protocols. It is common for many OBS solutions to support HTTP/REST, CDMI,
Amazon S3, and other object-specific interfaces.

IDC's File- and Object-Based Storage User Survey Findings

In 2017, IDC conducted a survey of 450 concurrent users of file and object-based storage in North
America. The study, called IDC's File- and Object-Based Storage Survey Findings, reported:

▪ 52.9% of 450 North America–based respondents started using OBS in the past two years.
▪ 41% of the respondents also indicated that they are currently using either an OBS appliance or
a commercial software-only offering, while 42% are using public cloud or managed private
cloud services.
▪ Over 26% of 254 respondents plan to integrate flash into their OBS environment, while 56.4%
have already done so. The primary reasons to integrate flash are higher storage density,
bandwidth (to move large data sets faster), and performance (throughput). Flash is integrated
into OBS to support data analytics of unstructured data, content applications, business
applications, and others.
▪ 48% of 281 respondents indicate that they use OBS in the public cloud to support a new
initiative, while 42.7% indicate (lower) cost as a secondary reason to adopt OBS in the public
cloud. Better data security and data protection are other top reasons to adopt public cloud.
▪ 422 respondents deployed OBS either as traditional on-/off-premises or as private cloud
storage. 37.7% of users deploying traditional on-/off-premises OBS and 34.6% of users
deploying private cloud indicate the reason for this choice of platform is because of sensitivity
of data (cannot be pushed into public cloud).
The research also indicates that the actual benefits of deploying OBS in terms of avoiding vendor lock-
in and flexibility of platform (private/public cloud, appliance, software only, open source software, etc.)
are greater than perceived benefits.

Backup, DR, Archive, and Active Archive are still dominant use cases for OBS. Newer use case such
as data analytics for unstructured data, media streaming, and web serving are deployed on off-
premises OBS and are expected to be revenue-generating workloads in the future.

©2018 IDC #US42665518e 7

LEARN MORE

Related Research
▪ IDC's Worldwide SBS, SDS, and FOBS Storage Solutions Taxonomy, 2018 (IDC
#US43579118, March 2018)
▪ Business and Content Applications Will Dominate Evolving Production SDS Deployments (IDC
#US43249017, December 2017)
▪ Veritas Vision 2017 - Renewed Focus on Multicloud Data Management (IDC #lcUS43114717,
September 2017)
▪ Worldwide Software-Defined Storage Forecast, 2017-2021: SDS Market Growth Significantly
Outpaces Enterprise Storage Growth, Led by HCI (IDC #US43062517, September 2017)
▪ Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Forecast, 2017-2021 (IDC #US42280717,
September 2017)
▪ Hedvig Brings Hyperscale Agility and Economics to Enterprises (IDC #US42983117, August
2017)
▪ Successful SDS Deployments Demand Requisite Expertise on the Part of Customers (IDC
#US42919517, August 2017)
▪ IDC's Worldwide Storage Software Taxonomy, 2017 (IDC #US42834017, August 2017)
▪ Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack: Consistent Performance and Data Protection for
OpenStack-Based Cloud (IDC #US42580517, June 2017)

Synopsis
This IDC study represents a vendor assessment model called the IDC MarketScape. This study is a
quantitative and qualitative assessment of the characteristics that assess a vendor's current and future
success in the said market or market segment and provide a measure of the vendor's ascendancy to
become a leader or maintain leadership. IDC MarketScape assessments are particularly helpful in
emerging markets that are often fragmented, have several players, and lack clear leaders.

The (scale-out) OBS market subsegment, which is part of the file and OBS market, is an example of an
emerging market. In this IDC MarketScape, IDC attempts to assess the capabilities and strategies of
key vendors of OBS solutions. IDC expects that market forces such as fierce competition and buyer
demand will accelerate the metamorphosis of this market into a mature market with only a few
dominant vendors. Open source–based stacks will create an additional dimension of complexity and
challenges. In all likelihood, the only survivors in this market may be vendors with robust partner
ecosystems and/or vendors with commercial variants of open source platforms.

"A new digitized world demands an infrastructure that is extremely scalable and flexible in terms of
delivery models and also payment options, with strong vendor strategic and research vision from the
vendor side along with unprecedented economies of scale," said Amita Potnis, research manager in
IDC's Storage team. "OBS platforms hold the promise and the potential to support end users along this
path of digitization. In this competitive market, vendors offering OBS platforms with the most
compelling value proposition via a long-term strategy, research and development plan, and flexible
delivery models will survive."

©2018 IDC #US42665518e 8

About IDC
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