Firms must triple their storage budgets for 2027 to accommodate surging memory prices, Gartner warned as it unveiled its latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms.
The analyst named an unchanged line-up of six ‘Leaders’ in this year’s report, which is designed to help heads of infrastructure and IT operations to evaluate vendor platforms.
Just like last year, the dot belonging to Everpure – formerly Pure Storage – was placed furthest up and right of this leading sextet.
“Structural transformation unlike any before”
In its market overview, Gartner claimed the enterprise storage platform market is “undergoing a structural transformation unlike any before”.
This is being driven by four “major market forces”, including – most obviously – “extreme supply chain volatility and costs”, it asserted.
“For 2027, heads of I&O must budget for 250% to 300% of their 2025 storage spend to accommodate surging memory and storage prices,” Gartner said.
The price per gigabyte of enterprise SSDs has risen by more than 15 times that of nearline HDDs over the past 12 months, the analyst pointed out.
“A storage-constrained environment, with elevated costs, is projected to persist into at least 2028, fundamentally reshaping how I&O leaders budget, procure and manage storage,” it stated.
Production-scale artificial intelligence, hypervisor replatforming and cyber data resilience are the other three market forces shaking up the sector, according to Gartner.
Quadrant bragging rights
Among the half-dozen ‘Leaders’, besides Everpure, Huawei appears to have secured bragging rights of sorts as its dot lurched upwards and rightwards year on year.
This sextet – which also included HPE, IBM, NetApp and Dell – achieved the highest composite scores for their ‘Ability to Execute’ and ‘Completeness of Vision’.
Marked down for its “relatively low market visibility”, Hitachi Vantara was once again named a ‘Visionary’.
Positioned as ‘Niche Player,’ IET was the only other vendor included in this year’s Magic Quadrant (with DDT being dropped from last year).
The market watcher also gave an “honourable mention’ to Lenovo-owned Infinidat thanks to its “strong reputation among large enterprises”.
In another eye-catching prediction from the report (which Gartner subscribers can access here), Gartner said it expects consumption-based storage as a service (STaaS) to replace half of on-premise alternatives by 2029 (up from 25% in early 2026).
