SUSE Enterprise Storage rated ‘excellent’ across multiple categories in Gartner’s latest analysis of critical capabilities for object storage

The first sentence of the opening paragraph of Gartner’s latest round-up states ‘cost reduction is driving interest in on-premise object storage’. That’s a statement few commentators would disagree with, as IT teams in just about every vertical sector routinely facing the same squeeze: an all-too familiar scenario of ‘exploding’ data volumes and flat budgets.

‘More with less’ is the order of the day, with pressure coming from all sides: pressure on capacity, pressure on performance, pressure on CapEx – and even on OpEx – and pressure on staff headcount. IoT, video, performance data, edge computing – and other trends in a long and well-established list are driving the need for greater object storage capacity, and simultaneously testing the limits of what can be achieved with existing approaches, forcing enterprises to re-evaluate storage strategy and consider new approaches – if you’re struggling, you’re in good company.

Against this backdrop, Gartner’s analysis will be welcomed by many as a helpful tool when it comes to working out how to compare vendor and navigate the supplier maze. The latest advice on the object storage players, published on January 30th this year (2019) has no new entrants, and no exits: exactly the same line is compared as before, with SUSE compared against 12 other vendors including proprietary giants like IBM, Dell and NetApp, and alongside Ceph open source rival Red Hat.

Enterprise vendors are compared on storage efficiency, security and multi-tenancy, capacity, interoperability, manageability, performance, resilience, and value, and assessed against a series of use cases: analytics, archiving, back-up, cloud storage, and hybrid cloud storage. The use cases enable enterprises to make ‘real world’ comparisons based on actual deployments, great if your storage need is one of the identified use cases, not so great if it isn’t. Feedback from the installed base – which the vendors must facilitate – is also taken into consideration, making the analysis at least partly peer led. Three critical traits and considered: meta-data implementation, support for file protocols, and hybrid cloud storage capabilities.

Gartner has rated SUSE as excellent in four out of five use cases: analytics, archiving, back-up, and cloud storage – so if these areas are issues for you, SUSE should be on your radar for evaluation as a potential supplier. On critical capabilities, Gartner rated SUSE excellent for storage efficiency, security and multi-tenancy, capacity, interoperability, manageability, performance and resilience – and ahead of Red Hat when it comes to value. To read the report go here.

And to learn more about SUSE Enterprise Storage go here.