Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2IH2LGI&ct=150626&st=sb

Source: Gartner (June 2015)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Amazon Web Services

Locations: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has cloud regions in North America (U.S., West; U.S., East and U.S., GovCloud) EMEA (Germany, Ireland), Asia/Pacific (Japan, Singapore, Australia, China — in preview), South America (Brazil)

Key storage services: Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS — in preview), Amazon Glacier

AWS continues to be an innovative and agile cloud storage provider with a steady cadence of new products and functionalities that is helping it sustain its market leadership. Amazon S3 is the flagship storage service, targeted at customers' requirements for low-cost, durable, unstructured data storage. Amazon EBS serves as persistent block storage that can offer low-latency access backed by an optional solid-state drive (SSD) tier, while Amazon Glacier is targeted at long-term data retention needs with infrequent access and that can tolerate a greater retrieval time. Amazon recently launched Elastic File System to cater to growing customer demand for a scalable file system in the cloud for Network File System (NFS)-based applications. To enable hybrid cloud storage deployments, it offers AWS Storage Gateway, a virtual storage appliance that presents an on-premises Internet SCSI (iSCSI) block and virtual tape library (VTL) interface that locally caches active data while moving inactive data to Amazon S3 and/or Glacier.

Strengths

• AWS's storage portfolio continues to evolve to meet growing customer needs across a wide set of use cases. It has hundreds of customers operating at petabyte (PB) scale with a few customers even exceeding 100 PBs — a testament to its scale and customers' trust in its operational prowess.
• AWS has built an impressive marketplace ecosystem of SaaS partners that allows customers to more easily manage, analyze and protect the data that sits in the underlying storage tiers.
• The Amazon S3 API enjoys wide ecosystem support from technology partners as well as gaining high mind share with independent and enterprise application developers as a preferred cloud storage API.

Cautions

• AWS's pricing is complex, as its charges extra for several services that many of its competitors bundle as part of the base price.
• AWS's global system integration partners are struggling to balance customer expectations of a high degree of expertise with capabilities delivered as industrialized services at competitive costs.
• AWS lacks a consistent API across S3 and Glacier, forcing most customers to use S3 policies for data tiering to Glacier. Commercial applications supporting direct access to the Glacier API are few.