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. 

StoneFly storage OS software now delivers WORM, deduplication and ransomware protection

StoneFly released a newer version of their patented storage Operating System (OS): StoneFusion and SCVM. The storage software also facilitates cloud integration with StoneFly appliances and other servers. Supported cloud repositories include Azure, Amazon S3, other S3 compatible cloud and StoneFly private cloud.

SCVM is also available as a standalone product compatible with VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, and Citrix (formerly XenServer) hypervisors facilitating data center consolidation, VM migration, VM snapshots, DR, and other similar use-cases.

The latest version (8.0.4) of the enterprise storage software includes WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many) storage provisioning; anti-virus, malware and ransomware detection and removal; deduplication for NAS volumes (in addition to iSCSI SAN workloads); and GUI (Graphical User Interface) update that offers real-time performance reporting of provisioned NAS, SAN and unified storage resources.

StoneFly patented storage OS, StoneFusion and SCVM, enables users to provision NAS, SAN and unified (NAS + SAN) volumes on bare-metal, Windows and Linux servers. The enterprise storage OS comes pre-configured in all StoneFly storage and backup and disaster recovery (DR) appliances.

StoneFusion is also available as a standalone software. The storage OS can be installed on bare-metal servers and mainstream enterprise storage appliances such as Dell EMC, HPE, among several others.

Besides storage provisioning, the storage OS facilitates integration of several enterprise-grade features such as delta-based snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous replication, volume encryption, automated storage tiering, and others.

The SCVM storage OS can be installed on mainstream hypervisors such as VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, and Citrix (formerly XenServers) to provision virtual NAS, virtual SAN, virtual unified (NAS + SAN) storage repositories and/or to integrate desired cloud repositories to build a hybrid HCI storage solution. With SCVM, users can run VMs in their preferred cloud, create snapshots in the cloud, replicate to the cloud, and more.

StoneFly also recently introduced StoneFusion MSP edition, the storage OS version that facilitates MSPs and large organizations to provision virtual, purpose-built, multi-tenant and noise-less storage repositories on on-premises, remote or cloud-based servers. 

Commenting on the new update the CEO and founder of StoneFly Mo Tahmasebi said, “Our culture is driven by customer feedback. We listen to our enterprise customers and develop our solutions accordingly to enhance their experience. The latest version of our storage OS is developed to help with concerns such as high impact ransomware attacks, compliance and data center consolidation. It’s an eighth generation product, which is truly one-of-a-kind in the context that it facilitates NAS, SAN, unified and hyperconverged workloads. Not many storage OS in the market can do that”

StoneFusion comes pre-configured in all StoneFly NAS, SAN and Unified (NAS + SAN) appliances. It’s also available as a standalone product for bare-metal, Windows and Linux-based servers.

SCVM is the built-in virtual storage appliance in StoneFly HCI appliances including Unified Server and Storage (USS) appliances, the DR365, DR365V and DR365U backup and DR appliances.

New Supermicro high-performance enterprise-class vSAN offering ideal for hyper-converged infrastructure

Super Micro Computer has introduced another enterprise-class vSAN solution to its broad portfolio of fully configured out-of-the-box systems.  Leveraging Supermicro Ultra SuperServer systems, combined with industry-proven vSAN software-defined storage, target hyper-convergence infrastructure.  

Supermicro 1U and 2U Ultra SuperServers support the highest performance Intel Xeon Scalable processors (up to 205W TDP) with 24 DIMM slots. Ultra platforms can support not only a large number of NVMe drives but also ample PCI-E lanes to accommodate network interface cards (NICs) to provide sufficient bandwidth for external access through fabrics. 

Ultra systems are configurable with support of 20, 10, 4, or 2 hot-swappable NVMe drives that can be optimized for different types of applications The Ultra SuperServers are tuned for power, efficiency, scale, and flexibility. 

Supermicro's solution has passed the rigorous testing to be certified for VMware vSAN ReadyNode, for balance and optimized performance – from the hardware up through the firmware stack to the VMware vSAN software. Native to the VMware vSphere hypervisor, VMware vSAN uses solid-state NVMe drives for high capacity input/output and low latency.

Seamless integration with VMware vSphere and the VMware ecosystem makes the hyperconverged solution optimal for cloud native applications, remote office and branch office implementations, test and development environments, management clusters, security zones, and virtual desktop infrastructure.

Supermicro is also launching the Intel Select Solutions for VMware vSAN. Intel Select Solutions from Supermicro are verified, ready-to-adopt workload-optimized configurations for specific workloads across compute, storage and networks. They help accelerate deployment of complex solutions by reducing the guesswork and in-house evaluation required to achieve excellent performance.

"Supermicro's extensive vSAN hyper-converged solution portfolio delivers to customers the ideal storage platform for business-critical applications," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO of Supermicro. "Supermicro systems and broad line of vSAN ready nodes are highly-configurable to support computational-intensive workloads while offering low total cost of ownership (TCO) for intelligent enterprise deployments."