Gartner Inc. has ranked three upstarts ahead of the likes of EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Company and IBM in its latest solid-state appliance critical capabilities report: namely, Kaminario, Pure Storage and SolidFire Inc.

Gartner’s latest assessment differs from its most recent Magic Quadrant for solid-state arrays, which looks at an organization’s vision and its ability to execute on that. Instead the critical capabilities report looks at an individual product’s capabilities only – and the results are surprisingly different, as you can see in the diagram below.

SolidFire’s SF Series is the surprise leader in the report, closely followed by the Pure Storage FA Series and Kaminario K2. Notably SolidFire and Kaminario are ranked as mere “visionaries” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, way behind “Leaders” EMC and IBM. Only PureStorage has managed to rank consistently first in both studies.

But what are the capabilities that led Gartner to its conclusions? Here’s a quick run-down of the top three:

• SolidFire’s SF Series is differentiated by QoS; a commendable REST-based API; close integration with common hypervisors; self-healing infrastructure; public cloud API support; and a broad cloud management platform.
• The Pure Storage FA Series comes in second due to its compelling data reduction features; overall low array capacities; reliability; QoS features limited; product satisfaction guarantees; controller investment protection and inclusive pricing.
• Kaminario K2 offers strong performance with public benchmark transparency; no file access support; scale-up and scale-out; no replication; limited QoS; 7-year SSD warranty; non-disruptive firmware and software updates; and all-inclusive pricing.

As for the more established “Leaders”, these are some of the failings Gartner points too:

• EMC’s XtremIO: Upgrade to compression disruptive; node addition means an outage; and blocks of data inaccessible if X-brick has complete outage.
• HP’s 3PAR StoreServ 7450 offers no inline dedupe or compression; no file protocol support; and complex pricing compared to the startups.
• Finally, IBM’s FlashSystem V840 only allows block access; has no dedupe, and requires separate SVC for data management services, which means more complex management.

You can download your a copy of Gartner’s critical capabilities report via SolidFire, though registration is required.

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