Gartner Inc. has published its first ever “Magic Quadrant” for distributed file systems and object storage, the software and hardware that’s intended to enable companies to deal with the rapid growth of unstructured data.

The analyst firm reckons that tech behemoth Dell EMC is leading the way in the newly defined segment, and is some distance ahead of other “leaders” IBM Corp. and Scality. The only “challenger” in the ranking is data storage provider Hitachi Data Systems Corp., while Red Hat Inc. and SwiftStack Inc. landed in the “visionaries” box. There are, however, no less than seven “challengers” bringing up the rear in the shape of NetApp Inc., Cloudian Inc., DataDirect Networks (DDN), SUSE, Caringo Inc., Panasas Inc. and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.

In its report, which assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each company’s offering, Gartner says that Dell EMC’s position at the top of the tree is thanks to the strength of its popular Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage line of products. The analyst firm says they have a proven track record of large production deployments across a variety of enterprises. It also points to Dell EMC’s broad product portfolio, deployment and consumption models, and aggressive pricing as key reasons for its No. 1 ranking.

IBM also ranks highly as a result of the maturity and flexible deployment options of its IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Cloud Object Storage products, and also the differentiated way the latter product allows users to secure data at rest, or inactive data that’s stored in digital form. Scality, meanwhile, gets a big thumbs-up for providing a native unified platform both both files and objects, its strong channel partnerships and OEM relationships with Dell and HPE, and its high performance with smaller files.

One of the more interesting entrants is little-known SwiftStack, which edged out a number of more illustrious rivals. Gartner singled SwiftStack out for developing significant capabilities that enable customers to reduce the costs of implementing and operating an OpenStack Swift cluster.

In a blog post, Mario Blandini, the company’s vice president of marketing, said the company’s licensing model allows customers to “pay as you grow,” providing an alternative to the traditional licensing models used by other companies in Gartner’s list.

For now, distributed file systems and object storage is still an emerging niche category in enterprise information technology, but with the exponential growth in big data, it’s one that will probably grow to become quite important. As such, Gartner warns that it’s still “early days” and that means it’s likely that we’re going to see some big movements in coming editions of its Magic Quadrant rankings as competitors compete to learn exactly what kind of solution their customers will want.