IDC announces that global converged systems market grows 3.5 percent year over year during the third quarter

According to data released this week by the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, global converged systems market revenue increased 3.5 percent year over year to US$3.75 billion during the third quarter of this year. 

IDC's converged systems market view offers three segments: certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure, integrated platforms, and hyperconverged systems. The certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure market generated roughly $1.26 billion in revenue during the third quarter, which represents a contraction of 8.4 percent year over year and 33.7 percent of all converged systems revenue. 

Integrated platforms sales declined 13.9 percent year over year in the third quarter of this year, generating $475 million worth of sales. This amounted to 12.6 percent of the total converged systems market revenue. 

Revenue from hyperconverged systems sales grew 18.7 percent year over year during the third quarter of 2019, generating nearly $2.02 billion worth of sales. This amounted to 53.7 percent of the total converged systems market.

"The converged systems market continues to grow despite a challenging overall datacenter infrastructure environment," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. "In particular, hyperconverged solutions remain in demand as vendors do an excellent job positioning the solutions as an ideal framework for hybrid, multi-cloud environments due to their software-defined nature and ease of integration into premises-agnostic environments."

IDC offers two ways to rank technology suppliers within the hyperconverged systems market: by the brand of the hyperconverged solution or by the owner of the software providing the core hyperconverged capabilities. 

As the data relates to the branded view of the hyperconverged systems market, Dell Technologies was the largest supplier with $708.4 million in revenue and a 35.1 percent share. Nutanix generated $262.2 million in branded hardware revenue, representing 13.0 percent of the total HCI market during the quarter. There was a three-way tie for third between Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo, generating $109.0 million, $91.9 million, and $91.5 million in revenue each, which represents 5.4 percent, 4.6 percent, and 4.5 percent share of the market share respectively. 

From the software ownership view of the market, new systems running VMware hyperconverged software represented $766.2 million in total in the third quarter of this year vendor revenue, or 38.0 percent of the total market. Systems running Nutanix hyperconverged software represented $549.2 million in third quarter vendor revenue or 27.2 percent of the total market. Both amounts represent the value of all HCI hardware, HCI software, and system infrastructure software sold, regardless of how it was branded at the hardware level. 

Global enterprise external OEM storage systems market revenue grows by a mere 1.3 percent for the third quarter, IDC reveals

According to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, global spending on enterprise external OEM storage systems grew 1.3 percent year over year to US$6.6 billion during the third quarter of this year. 

Total external OEM storage capacity shipments were up 6.8 percent year over year to 17.3 exabytes during the quarter. Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale data centers declined 6.8 percent year over year in the thrid quarter this year to $5.8 billion. 

Total market capacity shipments (External OEM + ODM Direct + Server-Based Storage) declined 13.9 percent to 98.8 exabytes.

Dell Technologies was the largest enterprise external OEM storage systems supplier during the quarter, accounting for 31.5 percent of global revenue. NetApp and HPE/New H3C Group tied for second with 9.9 percent and 9.6 percent of the market, respectively. 

Huawei, Hitachi, and IBM tied for the fourth position with revenue shares of 7.0 percent, 6.2 percent and 6.0 percent, respectively. Despite growing and gaining market share during the third quarter, Pure Storage and Lenovo did not finish among the top 5 companies. 

The total All Flash Array (AFA) market generated $2.58 billion in revenue during the quarter, up 11.7 percent year over year. The Hybrid Flash Array (HFA) market was worth slightly less than $2.54 billion in revenue, down 1.7 percent from the third quarter last year. 

On a geographic basis, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) grew the fastest of any region, up 12.5 percent year over year. Japan grew 2.5 percent; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) was down 1.0 percent; and the Americas declined 2.7 percent. China as a standalone country grew 20.4 percent year over year in the third quarter this year.

Dell EMC PowerOne launches autonomous infrastructure that automates tasks, delivers ready-to-run resources in few clicks

Dell Technologies releases Dell EMC PowerOne autonomous infrastructure to make deploying, managing and consuming IT easier for organizations. 

PowerOne integrates PowerEdge compute, PowerMax storage, PowerSwitch networking and VMware virtualization into a single system combined with a built-in intelligence engine to automate thousands of manual steps over its lifecycle. 

At the heart of PowerOne's autonomous operations is a built-in, advanced automation engine. PowerOne empowers users to focus on their business, whether that means deploying workloads, applications, or developing new products and services. 

Much like lane assist, navigation and other features in autonomous vehicles, the vehicle does most operations on its own while the passenger must let the car know the desired destination. PowerOne's advanced automation allows administrators to state a desired business outcome – and the system calculates the best way to do the rest. 

The automation engine takes advantage of a Kubernetes microservices architecture and uses Ansible workflows to assist users by automating the component configuration and provisioning, delivering a customer-managed datacenter-as-a-service. 

PowerOne provides a single system-level application programming interface (API), giving users the control to create business objective-specific pools of resources. This API can be tied into existing tools, such as service portals, to deliver programmable versus manual IT operations. This is known as Infrastructure as Code - virtually eliminating the need to log in to individual component management systems. With PowerOne, organizations can create workload-ready VMware clusters in only a few clicks.

With PowerOne, users can assist  speeds installation and configuration using built-in workflows based on VMware Validated Designs and Dell EMC best practices. The Lifecycle Assist helps reduce infrastructure risk by simplifying daily operations and life cycle management with automated modular system updates and validation, continually checking the correct hardware and firmware settings. 

The offering also allows expansion that matches infrastructure with business needs by adding, removing or reassigning capacity and resources through automated provisioning and scaling features. Customers can align operations with business requirements.

StorMagic introduces Lightweight “Edge in a Box,” its redundant hyperconverged offering to simplify edge computing

StorMagic announced availability of its all-inclusive “Edge in a Box” solution, optimized to run edge or small data center onsite applications with 100 percent uptime. “Edge in a Box” includes Schneider Electric’s innovative 6U Wall Mount EcoStruxure Micro Data Center, any two x86 servers and StorMagic SvSAN software for less than $12,000. 

Enterprise customers with hundreds or thousands of sites as well as SMBs (small to medium sized businesses) with less than five sites can begin processing, managing and storing data in minutes, on the leanest, most lightweight solution on the market.

“Edge in a Box” is simple to install and manage without requiring onsite IT staff, making it ideal for both edge computing sites and SMBs. The solution can be tailored to meet exact customer requirements and includes Schneider Electric’s 6U Wall Mount EcoStruxure Micro Data Center composed of a unique wall-mountable low-profile enclosure, APC Smart-UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) and customizable physical security, remote management and servicing options.

The solution supports servers from manufacturers like Dell, HPE and Lenovo with any combination of disk drive, memory and processor.

Customers can choose from VMware, Microsoft or open-source KVM.

SvSAN provides storage virtualization, high availability and a lightweight remote witness that can manage up to 1,000 edge sites.

“StorMagic’s ‘Edge in a Box’ is designed for edge computing environments not optimized for IT systems, and leverages Schneider Electric’s self-contained, secure, wall-mountable EcoStruxure Micro Data Center for hyperconverged architectures,” said Jim Simonelli, SVP emerging businesses, secure power division, Schneider Electric. “Industries such as retail, manufacturing and SLED are all looking for ways to lower the cost of IT at smaller locations, deploy standardized, pre-integrated systems faster while still ensuring resiliency. ‘Edge in a Box’ with our EcoStruxure Micro Data Center complete with remote management is an ideal solution to meet these requirements.”

“StorMagic’s ‘Edge in a Box’ is a very lightweight, budget-friendly offering that allows any edge site or SMB to deploy a simple IT solution optimized for fast onsite integration,” said Bruce Kornfeld, CMO and GM-Americas, StorMagic. “SvSAN is compatible with any x86 server, with any configuration and the leading hypervisors, so customers have the ultimate flexibilty to deploy only what they need, keeping costs to a bare minimum.”

StorMagic’s “Edge in a Box” is currently available with pricing starting below US$12,000. It is available from a global network of joint StorMagic and Schneider Electric channel partners.