NetApp is a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms

Gartner has named NetApp a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms, which we believe affirms our ongoing commitment to our customers to deliver innovation and industry-leading solutions. We at NetApp are both proud and humbled to be recognized by Gartner as a Leader for 12 consecutive years.

This year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant represents an evolutionary milestone as Gartner transitions its Magic Quadrant market category from Primary Storage to Primary Storage Platforms. We believe that our placement in the revised category underscores the confidence that industry analysts have in the completeness of our vision for the future of storage platforms and our ability to execute on that vision. From our perspective, it’s a testament to our intelligent data infrastructure strategy and persistent focus on meeting and exceeding the evolving needs of our customers today and tomorrow.

What do we see in that storage platform future? Let’s level-set for a moment. Businesses today operate in a hybrid world: They typically store data across on-premises environments and multiple clouds; they manage a growing number of workloads, including AI and GenAI; they prioritize protecting apps and data from ever-increasing ransomware attacks; and their infrastructure consumption models are rapidly evolving. But for most organizations, infrastructure complexity and skills gaps continue to hold them back. They urgently need a true hybrid cloud platform capable of delivering two essential things: simplicity at scale to accelerate every workload, and seamless flexibility to operate across clouds and to optimize VMware and containerized environments. That’s what we deliver today, and where we continue to focus our innovation for tomorrow.

Our view of what a storage platform can and should be is broader than that of most storage vendors. We’ve seen businesses struggling to master the reality of hybrid multicloud data infrastructure, so we’ve worked for over a decade to deliver the only true intelligent data infrastructure platform in the industry. It’s fully hybrid: a complete portfolio of storage solutions powered by a single storage operating system running on premises and natively in all three major public clouds; a unified control plane; and comprehensive, intelligent data services. For our customers, the result is unprecedented simplicity and flexibility.

Note that while others talk about simplicity, they’re often constructing “hybrid” platforms composed of siloed resources that actually inhibit flexibility. Despite their claims, no other storage vendor comes close to NetApp’s simplicity at scale and no-compromise flexibility across hybrid cloud.

Let’s dig a little deeper into how we bring simplicity and flexibility together in our intelligent data infrastructure platform.

In a world of ever-increasing IT complexity, simplicity isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a market advantage. We never stop working to make the NetApp experience simple in critical ways:

• Unified data storage. For years, NetApp has been a pioneer: in the development of NAS, in bringing unified storage to the world, in developing block-optimized storage, and in offering multiple tiers of price/performance on premises and in the cloud. Unlike some other storage vendors, however, our innovation has not resulted in siloed systems with unrelated operating systems that require your teams to learn, manage, upgrade, and protect multiple disparate environments. Our customers love NetApp^® ONTAP^® as much as we do, and with it they can count on a consistent experience across block, file, and object workloads on premises and in the cloud—whether that’s VMs, databases, EDA, AI, analytics, backup, or anything else. It’s all ONTAP, everywhere.

• Unified control. Customers have a window across all NetApp systems, on premises or in the cloud, through the NetApp BlueXP™ unified control plane. BlueXP services enable our customers to do a great deal: monitor infrastructure SLAs, ensure that governance and compliance requirements are met, and protect data from errors, disasters, and ransomware. Just as important, administrators can balance performance with costs while maximizing capacity utilization.

• Built-in data protection. Data is the lifeblood of your organization, and the storage systems it lives on are your last line of defense. That’s why we deliver real-time, AI/ML-based ransomware detection designed for 99%+ accuracy, guaranteed recovery, and integrated business continuity.^{No ransomware detection or prevention system can completely guarantee safety from a ransomware attack. Although it’s possible that an attack might go undetected, NetApp technology acts as an important additional layer of defense.} We believe that data protection should be built in, not bolted on, and we continue to invest and innovate in industry-leading data protection capabilities that eliminate the need for complex, performance-degrading add-ons.

• Comprehensive sustainability. We make it simple for our customers to progress toward their sustainability goals by providing tools to identify and store only the data they need in the most carbon-efficient location, on premises or in the cloud. Our leading raw-to-effective capacity and always-on 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee optimize storage utilization, and, unlike other vendors, our energy-efficiency data follows PAIA standards and is based on actual customer usage. A sustainability dashboard enables customers to track and predict energy consumption and take recommended actions to reduce their carbon footprint.

Alongside simplicity at scale, the unparalleled flexibility of our solutions enables you to choose the right storage for your specific needs through:

• Workload optimization without silos. Since we pioneered NAS 30 years ago, our innovation has been relentless. We were the first to bring truly unified storage to market with systems that support file, block, and object. And we’ve continued to meet evolving customer needs by delivering storage optimized exclusively for block workloads. In just the past 18 months, we’ve introduced our high-performance SAN offering with NetApp ASA A-Series arrays and our capacity product, the NetApp ASA C-Series arrays.

• Unmatched cost optimization. Our customers are able to achieve the lowest cost of data by flexibly balancing their performance and budget requirements. Our high-performance AFF A-Series and ASA A-Series systems power the most demanding workloads, such as AI, VMware, and database apps. The AFF C-Series and ASA C-Series capacity-optimized flash systems offer the ideal blend of performance and cost for general-purpose workloads. NetApp FAS systems are optimized for secondary storage use cases like data tiering, backup, and cyber vault, and they help deliver the lowest cost of data across its lifecycle.

• Seamless data mobility. NetApp is the only vendor helping customers bridge on premises and cloud with comprehensive data services and secure, efficient app and data mobility. Alone among storage vendors, ours is a true hybrid experience, fully integrated on premises and natively embedded in the world's largest cloud providers—Azure, Google, and AWS. Customers can freely choose the best location for their workloads, confident they’ll encounter a consistent operating experience no matter where they store their data.

• Choice of consumption model. Storage as a service (STaaS) is a valuable option for many of our customers, and we’ve provided an easy pathway to STaaS through the NetApp Keystone^® portfolio. Unlike some vendors pushing STaaS on their customers, we enable STaaS—on premises or in the cloud—for each customer when that shift best suits them operationally and financially. We’ve seen rapid customer adoption of Keystone and zero attrition: once customers choose Keystone, they not only keep using it but expand their usage.

• VM and container options. To address the ongoing VMware challenge, NetApp delivers options. First, we enable customers to realize savings of up to 25% on their VMware licensing fees by reducing their compute consumption and offloading data management to ONTAP. And we offer unmatched flexibility for the future, enabling customers to adopt a different hypervisor and/or containerize their apps—or shift to cloud. Whether you go with a traditional VM-based architecture or leverage containers and Kubernetes, we have you covered. In fact, we were ranked #1 by Gartner for the Containers Use Case in the 2024 Critical Capabilities for Primary Storage Platforms.

We want all our customers to sleep well at night and not worry about receiving notifications of missed SLAs or catastrophic data loss. That’s why we’ve developed critical guarantees around our storage solutions, which include: 

• NetApp Six Nines Data Availability Guarantee. We guarantee six nines (99.9999%) data availability with our ASA systems. ^{Terms and conditions apply.}

• NetApp Storage Efficiency Guarantee. We guarantee the efficiency of our storage in order to maximize your value and minimize energy consumption. Efficiency is 4:1 for SAN protocols, 1.5:1 for NAS protocols, and 3:1 for VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM workloads on NAS. ^{Terms and conditions apply.}

• NetApp Ransomware Recovery Guarantee. Part of what makes NetApp the most secure storage on the planet is that we guarantee your recovery if a ransomware attack occurs. ^{Deployed NetApp AFF, ASA, or FAS storage according to NetApp ransomware protection best practices, with support from NetApp PS. Warranty includes both technology deployment and PS engagement. Terms and conditions apply. No ransomware detection or prevention system can completely guarantee safety from a ransomware attack. Although it’s possible that an attack might go undetected, NetApp technology acts as an important additional layer of defense.}

As we celebrate our continued recognition in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, we remain dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in enterprise storage. Our vision is clear: to provide solutions that are as simple as they are flexible, ensuring that our customers are well equipped to meet the demands of today and the challenges of tomorrow.

Thank you for your continued trust and support. Here’s to another year of innovation and storage infrastructure leadership!

To explore further, read the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms report.

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms, Jeff Vogel, Chandra Mukhyala, September 18, 2024.
Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Primary Storage Platforms, Jeff Vogel, Chandra Mukhyala, September 19, 2024.
A Leader in Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms (2024)
A 5-year Leader in Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage (2019-2023)
A 3-year Leader in Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays (2016-2018)
A 6-year Leader in Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays (2013-2018)
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