GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Kubernetes Data Storagev1.0

Traditional Storage and Software-Defined Storage

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Market Categories and Deployment Types
  3. Key Criteria Comparison
  4. GigaOm Radar
  5. Vendor Insights
  6. Analyst’s Take

1. Summary

The rise in remote work spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the growth of containerization projects, increasing the complexity and scope of business-critical applications. This has created a need for reliable, highly available, persistent container storage. Enterprise Kubernetes storage products enable organizations to build storage solutions on top of their existing infrastructure, allowing them to create an abstracted data-storage layer that sits on top of the physical hardware.

In this report, we take a deep dive into the positioning and trajectory of each of the leading players in this space. By expanding on the criteria identified in the companion Key Criteria for Enterprise Kubernetes Storage, this report aims to give IT professionals insights into the capabilities and value of each product, allowing readers to cut through the marketing clutter and get to the core strengths and weaknesses of each offering.

Beginning with an overview of the need for enterprise Kubernetes storage, and how it differs from Kubernetes-native storage, this report examines the market architecture of the sector, laying out the vendors on the dual axes of Feature Play vs. Platform play and Maturity vs. Innovation. The vendors are then categorized according to their rate of improvement in relation to other players in the space, and evaluated regarding their future trajectory.

The analysis continues with an exploration of the specific strengths of each solution and the areas of improvement needed, along with an assessment of each product’s market positioning. The aim is to give the reader a balanced and realistic view of the product and how it might be suitable for their organization in terms of the scale of their business as well as their preferred deployment model, which may be influenced by the infrastructure on which they are looking to build Kubernetes storage.

Read the full report to:

  • Gain insight into the differences between solutions that utilize software-defined storage (SDS) and those that use traditional controller-based architectures and add Kubernetes compatibility via Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugins.
  • Discover the products on the market that are already approaching a state of relative maturity, and the products that are still rapidly evolving and adapting to the changing requirements of organizations.
  • Learn how changes to the CSI specification are driving the rapid evolution of more traditionally conservative vendor offerings.
  • Explore the three core groups of products identified, and how their feature sets and maturity levels will strongly influence procurement decisions.

Enrico Signoretti is a world-renowned expert on data storage, having tracked the field for many years both as an analyst and through 25 years of experience in technical product strategy and management roles. Max Mortillaro is a cloud, data protection, and data storage expert with experience working across multiple industry verticals. A practitioner first and foremost, Max is currently engaged in the deployment of new IT infrastructures in the heavily regulated pharmaceutical industry. Analyst, blogger, and speaker Arjan Timmerman is an engineer at heart, with over 23 years of experience of providing high- and low-level business and infrastructure architectural advice to a multitude of organizations across the globe.