ANALYST Aug 25, 2026
Blocks & Files' Chris Mellor reports (Aug 24) on the yearly refresh of Gartner's Enterprise Storage Magic Quadrant. The six Leaders are unchanged — Everpure (the renamed Pure Storage), Huawei, HPE, NetApp, Dell and IBM — but positions shifted: Everpure now tops both axes, and NetApp, previously second, has been re-positioned behind Huawei and HPE. DDN was ejected from the report entirely; Hitachi Vantara sits as a Visionary; IEIT Systems (formerly Inspur) is a Niche Player; InfiniDat (Lenovo-owned) got an honorable mention. Gartner stresses that a vendor dropping out doesn't necessarily reflect a changed opinion — evaluation criteria and vendor focus shift too.
The admin lesson: quadrant position is a procurement conversation-starter, not a spec sheet. Analyst inclusion criteria (revenue minimums, customer counts, geographic presence) say little about the features your workload actually exercises — ONTAP's snapshot/SnapMirror ecosystem, storage efficiency, or ONTAP-specific tooling rarely factor in. Use MQ to justify shortlist breadth; use your own POC criteria (failover behavior, latency under rebuild, ransomware recovery drills) to pick.