Gartner’s annual refresh of its Enterprise Storage Magic Quadrant keeps the same six vendors within the Leaders quadrant while removing DDN from the latest evaluation scope.
Gartner states that the Enterprise Storage Magic Quadrant delivers a broad market overview of vendor positioning in a high-growth, highly differentiated segment. Vendors are categorized into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. This year’s Leaders group consists of Everpure, Huawei, HPE, NetApp, Dell and IBM.
No vendors are listed as Challengers in the updated report. Hitachi Vantara is positioned as a Visionary, while China’s IEIT Systems — formerly known as Inspur — falls into the Niche Players category.
Everpure, the rebranded Pure Storage, takes the top spot among Leaders, ranking highest in both execution capability and vision completeness. NetApp, previously placed second, has slid behind Huawei and HPE. Dell and IBM maintain relatively stable positioning year over year.
Gartner Enterprise Storage MQ 2025 and 2026
The report adopts rigorous inclusion criteria, including minimum revenue thresholds, qualified active block, file and object storage customer volumes, minimum customer storage capacity metrics, and global geographic presence rules. HCI-focused vendors such as Nutanix and public cloud storage providers are excluded from this evaluation.
Gartner clarifies vendor roster changes: A vendor’s absence from the Magic Quadrant after a prior listing does not necessarily signal a downgraded assessment. It may reflect evolving market conditions, updated evaluation standards, or strategic business shifts from the vendor itself.
Lenovo-owned Infinidat receives an honorable mention. Gartner recognizes the firm for its strong enterprise reputation, high-performance cyber-resilient storage architecture, and differentiated design focused on availability and operational efficiency. Infinidat continues to stand out with outstanding customer satisfaction and consistent positive evaluations, serving as a viable alternative to established large-scale storage vendors.
VAST Data is not featured in this release, despite likely satisfying most, if not all, core inclusion benchmarks.
The report outlines key strategic planning assumptions through 2029:
By 2029, consumption-based Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) will replace 50% of on-premises enterprise storage and data service capital infrastructure spending, up from 25% in early 2026.
By 2029, over 80% of on-premises unstructured data will reside on unified consolidated storage platforms instead of standalone file and object systems, compared to 50% in 2025.
By 2029, 70% of enterprises will deploy AI-optimized storage tiers dedicated to large-scale AI inference and RAG workloads, a sharp increase from less than 10% in 2026.
By 2029, 100% of enterprise storage solutions will embed cyber storage capabilities focused on proactive active defense, surpassing the 25% recorded in early 2026, shifting focus beyond post-breach recovery.
For 2027, infrastructure and operations leaders need to budget 250% to 300% of their 2025 storage expenditure to offset rising memory and storage hardware costs.
Everpure and HPE have both published full public copies of the latest Gartner report.
Footnote
The Magic Quadrant is a two-dimensional evaluation model based on “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision”. It features four quadrants: Visionaries and Niche Players in the lower section, alongside Challengers and Leaders in the upper section. Top-tier vendors occupy the upper-right Leaders quadrant, balancing strong execution and comprehensive strategic vision; positioning closer to the top-right corner indicates stronger overall market competitiveness.
Beijing Qianxing Jietong Technology Co., Ltd.
Sandy Yang/Global Strategy Director
WhatsApp / WeChat: +86 13426366826
Email: yangyd@qianxingdata.com
Website: www.qianxingdata.com/www.storagesserver.com
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