From Cold Archives to Hot AI Commodity: Decoding our Take on Nutanix’s Position as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™
By Alexander Almeida, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Nutanix
As AI reshapes how organizations create value from their data, object storage is becoming an increasingly critical foundation for modern AI infrastructure. As this shift accelerates, we’re incredibly proud to share that Nutanix Objects Storage (part of the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) AI Data Platform) was recently named a "Leader" in the Forrester Wave™: Object Storage Solutions Report, Q2 2026. To us, this recognition reflects more than the strength of our current offering. We believe it shows an architectural approach built for the changing role of object storage, from a destination for backups and archives to a scalable data foundation for AI, analytics, and modern applications.
Remember when object storage was treated like the dusty attic of enterprise IT? It was the place you sent old backups and compliance archives to sit quietly in the dark.
Well, those days are officially over. The explosive rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and high-performance computing (HPC) has completely flipped the script. As noted in the recent Forrester Object Storage Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026 report, "Historically, object storage was mostly used for secondary workloads such as backup, archiving, and large unstructured datasets. Increasingly, however, it is becoming a primary storage tier for cloud‐native applications and AI-native workloads".
Similarly, Analyst and GigaOm Field CTO Whit Walters echoed this sentiment, stating that object storage “is now the dominant architectural standard for unstructured data, serving as the backbone for modern application stacks, cloud-native development, and massive scale analytics”.
A Leader in the AI Era
Modern applications have become increasingly dependent on unstructured data and, in turn, object storage as primary storage. Nutanix Unified Storage was designed from the outset to keep pace with growing demands for high performance, low latency, resilience, and scale.
Figure 1: Forrester WaveTM Object Storage Solutions Q2 2026
Not only was NUS recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave, we were also recognized as a "Customer Favorite," based on outstanding customer feedback among evaluated vendors. We are committed to delivering a balanced offering with a universally customer-friendly control plane and exceptionally high ease of use.
Furthermore, in the latest “GigaOm Object Storage Radar (v7.0)”, Nutanix also appeared and was evaluated among 27 suppliers.
Building the foundation for agentic AI To ensure high-value GPUs are never starved for data, object storage must deliver uncompromised velocity. Organizations are moving beyond simple chatbots to Agentic AI, the autonomous systems everyone is racing to build to perform complex reasoning over live enterprise data.
To power these workloads, Nutanix Objects Storage delivers an intelligent data engine that directly feeds AI pipelines. Through compute-adjacent architectures that are designed to eliminate bottlenecks, Nutanix Unified Storage transforms object storage into the high-speed "living memory" of the AI Factory.
The Analysts Named Nutanix among Top Vendors in the Market
Object storage is no longer just a cheap place to park cold data. It is the high-performance backbone of the modern enterprise. With industry-leading capabilities and unparalleled consumer-grade simplicity, Nutanix is here to help you turn your data into your greatest strategic advantage.
And our velocity shows no signs of slowing down. We just debuted Nutanix Unified Storage 5.4, a release that reinforces our mission to provide:
- A robust software-defined data platform that can run anywhere
- Extensible architecture to include new services and workloads such as AI ingest pipelines and workloads.
- Scale-out performance that is required of today’s next generation AI powered and cloud native applications.
You can explore every latest innovation in our NUS 5.4 announcement post here.
We are shaping the future of data. Learn more about Nutanix Unified Storage in the Forrester Wave Report here or take it for a Test Drive today.
1Forrester Research, Inc., The Object Storage Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026
Forrester Research, Inc, The Forrester Wave™: Object Storage Solutions, Q2 2026
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