IBM® is 17x a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Primary Storage

For the seventeenth consecutive time, IBM has been recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage.

At IBM Storage, we believe that leadership is about taking action, not just holding a position. That's why we're thrilled to be recognized as a Leader; we believe not just for our technology but also for the way we interact with our customers and drive our product decisions. Our focus on customer-centricity has led us to develop a storage portfolio that helps our clients build trusted and secure information supply chains, enabling them to manage their data and applications at the speed their business demands.

How does a Gartner Magic Quadrant work?

A Magic Quadrant provides a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers in markets where growth is high, and provider differentiation is distinct:

• Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow.
• Visionaries understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules but do not yet execute well.
• Niche Players focus successfully on a small segment or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
• Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

With an unparalleled legacy in data storage, IBM's inventions over the decades include the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, magnetic stripe readers, and more. Today, we believe being recognized as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage validates the ongoing innovations developed by our global team of engineers, product managers, and marketers.

Equally important, we feel it signals to enterprise IT leaders that IBM has the technologies, products, and solutions to meet their current and emerging business requirements. Clients worldwide know that they’ll benefit from our years of experience, comprehensive storage solutions, and world-class support.

What sets IBM FlashSystem apart?

The IBM FlashSystem family offers powerful all-flash and hybrid-flash solutions that provide efficient, high-performing virtualized storage designed to meet the full range of enterprise-class data services across entry to mid-range to high-end requirements.

Organizations today are expected to run more workloads than their current IT infrastructure can support. As a result, they are forced to make complicated choices about which workloads to run or buy additional purpose-built hardware; this leads to continual bloat of IT infrastructure, inefficient use of data floorspace, and increased power and cooling costs. Businesses are in need of enterprise-grade storage with flexible deployment options and economics that fit any IT budget. IBM FlashSystem is an all-flash storage array that delivers 1.8 PB of effective capacity per single rack unit[1].

Benefits include consolidated workloads, a smaller physical footprint requiring less rack space, and lower energy usage, which improves power and cooling costs. Additionally, IBM’s all-flash array features fast data delivery, threat detection, and recovery response rates. Unlike traditional storage arrays, IBM FlashSystem is engineered with unique durable FlashCore Module computational storage technology that analyzes ransomware  attack patterns as they are being written. By leveraging AI and machine learning models, IBM FlashSystem rapidly detects abnormal data patterns, indicating a potential cyber threat in less than a minute.[2]

Contact your preferred IBM Storage business partner or IBM sales professional to learn more about IBM storage solutions. You can explore IBM FlashSystem products and read the entire Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage report here.

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2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage, Jeff Vogel, Joseph Unsworth, 17 September, 2024. 

IBM was recognized in the Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays from 2014-18, also recognized in the Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Storage Arrays from 2013-18. The 2019 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage replaced these two Magic Quadrant reports.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request here.

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Footnotes:

[1] Results based on 1U control enclosure: 12 drives of 38.4TB each = 460.8TB configured in a 9+Q+P+S DRAID-6 array, after RAID overhead and metadata provisioning, deliver 302.12TB of usable capacity, with a 3:1 compression and 2:1 deduplication ratio equal 1.81PB of effective capacity.

[2] Internal experimentation by IBM Research has demonstrated detection of ransomware within 1 minute of the ransomware starting its encryption process. This experiment was done on a FlashSystem 5200 with 6 FCMs with the 4.1 firmware load. The 5200 had 8.6.3 GA level software loaded. The host connected to the 5200 was running Linux with XFS Filesystem. In this particular case, the IBM ransomware simulator called WannaLaugh was used. Underlying system must be compatible with FCM4.1 and version 8.6.3 GA level software loaded in order to receive results obtained.