GigaOm Rates the Object Stores

By Alex Woodie

Thanks to their infinite scalability, object stores are the software medium of choice for today’s big data and AI projects. But how do the various object stores compare? GigaOm shed some light on the question with its recent report.

GigaOm Field CTO White Walters dug into intricacies of nearly two dozen object stores with the sixth edition of the GigaOm Radar for Object Storage. The top spots went to Scality, Dell, Cloudian, and Pure Storage, which rang up high scores in key features, emerging features, and business criteria. Others that landed in the leader’s zone include Weka, Minio, NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, DDN, and VAST Data.

The key features identified by GigaOm include Kubernetes, workload optimization, auditing, versioning, ransomware protection, reporting and analytics, storage optimization, and public cloud integration. Pure Storage took home the highest score across these features, followed by Cloudian, Dell, NetApp, and Scality.

When it comes to emerging features, GigaOm sees two that matter: object content indexing and support for Container Object Storage Interface (COSI), an emerging standard. Pure Storage and Scality both had the top scores here, followed by Cloudian, Dell, and OSNexus.

The third major category in GigaOm’s comparison is business criteria, which includes things like cost, performance, flexibility, manageability, scalability, and ecosystem. Cloudian and MinIO took home the top spot in business criteria, followed by Dell, Quantum, Scality, NetApp, Pure Storage, and Hitachi Vantara.

GigaOm also ranks storage vendors according to how they position themselves in the market. All but three vendors are taking a broad platform play as opposed to a more niche oriented feature play. “This expansion reflects the demand for unified storage platforms that simplify data management across diverse workloads,” Walters wrote.

Similarly, the vendors are ranked on a spectrum of maturity versus innovation, with Scality, Weka, Minio, Dell, and Nutanix ranking higher for maturity, while VAST, Pure, Cloudian, DDN, Hitachi, and NetApp ranked higher for innovation.  “This distribution indicates that most vendors prioritize stability and reliable user experience while offering comprehensive platform solutions,” the GigaOm field CTO wrote.

Lastly, GigaOm ranks each vendor according to a perceived pace of business and product development in areas like AI and ML integration, cloud-native support, and high-performance object storage. VAST, Pure, Cloudian, MinIO, and WEKA are viewed as outperformers, while Scaility, Dell, NetApp, Hitachi, and DDN are considered fast movers.

In addition to comparing features, Walters provided some commentary on where he sees this category of software storage headed.

“The key characteristics of enterprise object stores have changed, with more attention paid to performance, ease of deployment, security, federation capabilities, and multitenancy,” Walters wrote. “Edge use cases are also becoming more prevalent, with smaller object storage installations at the edge serving small Kubernetes clusters and IoT infrastructure.”

GigaOm published its report in April. You can view a copy of it here.

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