Hitachi Vantara has been named a Leader and fast Mover in a GRadar for High-Performance Storage Optimized for AI Workloads report by the GigaOm research business.
The background here is that a re-energized Hitachi Vantara, led by a new CEO, Sheila Rohra, and an executive management team, is back among the major storage incumbent suppliers. It says that this is the first notable recognition for Hitachi iQ, which is rapidly developing, with a Time Machine facility unveiled earlier this month. Hitachi iQ was rated for its QoS, workload isolation, GPU Direct storage integration and AI-optimized data layout and management.
Octavian Tanase, chief product officer at Hitachi Vantara, stated: “AI isn’t just pushing the boundaries of what infrastructure needs to do; it’s completely redrawing them. Our goal with Hitachi iQ is to give customers a high-performance foundation that removes complexity, accelerates outcomes, and adapts to whatever their AI journey requires next. By integrating Hitachi iQ with our VSP One platform, we’re enabling a flexible, intelligent storage strategy that’s ready for what’s now and what’s next.”
Whit Walters, field CTO and analyst at GigaOm, offered this summary: “What really stood out about Hitachi Vantara’s offerings is the quality of service and the ability to isolate workloads. They’ve delivered a well-integrated, scalable platform in Hitachi iQ, backed by enterprise-proven storage. This combination gives organizations a powerful and flexible foundation for operationalizing AI at scale, especially as large-scale AI and GenAI workloads will require the ability to manage data and performance as demands continue to grow.”
Here is the report’s Radar diagram:
Like all GigaOm Radar diagrams, this evaluates supplier products in a technology area and locates them in a 2D circular space, a quasi-radar display screen, featuring concentric rings around a central bullseye – leader innermost, then challenger, and new entrant. Those set closer to the center are judged to be of higher overall value. Each vendor is characterized on two axes – balancing Maturity versus Innovation and Feature Play versus Platform Play. There is an arrow indicating the supplier’s development speed over the coming 12 to 18 months, from Forward Mover, through Fast Mover to Outperformer.
We notice that Hitachi Vantara is one of seven leaders and in closeness-to-the-center terms is positioned sixth behind the front runners: Pure Storage, followed by NetApp and HPE, then VAST Data, and Dell, either Hitachi Vantara in front of IBM. Pure Storage and VAST are rated as Outperformers compared to the others who, like Hitachi Vantara, are rated as slower Fast Movers.
There are five Challengers: Hammerspace, WEKA, Scality, Qumulo, and Quantum, with Hammerspace and WEKA being classed as Outperformers. Apart from feature and innovation-focused Quantum – Myriad is a new operating system – all of them, like the Leaders, are platform plays with varying degrees of balance between maturity and innovation.
We also note that DDN, a prominent AI storage supplier, is not present and neither is object storage supplier Cloudian. Both support fast data access to GPUs and emphasize AI in their features and roadmap. The usual reason for Radar report absence is no reply from the vendor to GigaOm analyst queries, and we are checking this with GigaOm.
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