Gartner defines enterprise storage platforms as the market consisting of products, value-based services and delivery methods designed to support diverse block, file and object storage workloads and use cases. Products and services include appliances, software-defined storage (SDS), data management and other data storage services provided through a centrally managed, multidomain control plane. Enterprise storage platforms address IT organizational requirements to operate and support standardized enterprise storage products. They also enable organizations to adopt a platform-services-centric infrastructure approach for structured and unstructured data applications. These platforms leverage AI-enabled telemetry to provide optimal infrastructure capabilities and SLA-based IT outcomes.
Gartner defines file and object storage platforms as software and/or hardware platforms that offer object and distributed file system technologies for storing and managing unstructured data over NFS, SMB and Amazon S3 access protocols. File and object storage platforms store, secure, protect and scale an organization’s unstructured data with access over the network using protocols such as NFS, SMB and Amazon S3. Use cases include analytics, workload consolidation, backup and archiving, hybrid cloud, object-native applications, cloud IT operations, and high-performance files.