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. 

LayerStack updates Cloud Platform to deliver scalable, reliable and flexible infrastructure

LayerStack has launched its own-developed cloud orchestration and cloud control panel, which underlines the good market position and attractiveness of LayerStack, and providing customers with a more scalable, reliable, and flexible infrastructure around the globe.

LayerStack has concentrated its resources on product development in the past two years, successfully developed a new cloud orchestration with more stable and fully under control environment, in order to lower overall IT costs, free up engineering time for new projects, improve delivery times, and reduce friction between its system and development teams. 

At the same time, LayerStack is also satisfied with the results of the better IT management features to their data centers, such as availability, scalability, security, and optimal levels of infrastructure utilization.

Since the company came up with a new idea of developing a new cloud orchestration since 2018, the LayerStack development team perceive their passion as not only enthusiasm for the role but also for the business at large, providing the company with a clear future perspective. 

The new orchestration layer design empowers continuous integration and continuous delivery that could meet the requirements of developers in LayerStack, including high availability (HA), post-deployment, failure recovery, scaling, and more. It also simplifies and de-risk complex IT processes and accelerate the delivery of IT services to quickly configure, provision, deploy, monitoring, backup, and security services. 

Another advantage to the new orchestration is that enables the company to make their products available on a wider variety of cloud environments, meaning LayerStack will increase their products’ exposure to a wider audience, and potentially expand revenue opportunities for the company.

A further key element of this milestone is that the new cloud control panel – LayerPanel v2.0 is now ready for all regions, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Los Angeles. Over a year in development, LayerPanel v2.0 has been specifically developed to meet the demands of the enterprise users by expanding its control panel features with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). 

The goal is to provide customers with maximum control over their cloud management. The APIs, developed at the company’s development team, will help users build, scale and sustain cloud servers on the new platform. At the same time, it enables integration into new features such as firewall management, private networking, templates, backups, and so much more.

Furthermore, organizations migrating to LayerStack often need to manage a large number of accounts for different clients. LayerPanel v2.0 gives customers granular control over their environments with the User permission management, like configuring a multi-account structure, managing user permission, centralized monitoring and much more.

LayerStack continued to invest in its technology, providing new solutions for the developer, mobile app development agency, software development agency, system integrator, managed service provider, value-added service provider, and hosting provider.

“We are celebrating our accomplishments from the past two years by continuing to commit to our main focus: Striving for innovative and continuous improvements,” said Dennis Ng. “We look forward to a strong year ahead.”

“We are delighted to have our development team with great experience and standing in the cloud industry,” said Dennis Ng, the CTO of LayerStack. “Every interaction with our customers must be fast and reliable. Especially in today’s fast-moving IaaS market, our cloud infrastructure needs to be agile, adaptable and ready to be changed as our customers change their strategy.”

Alpha and Omega Semiconductor unveils 18V 2A and 3A EZBuck in thermally enhanced ultra-thin TSOT23-6 package

Alpha and Omega Semiconductor Limited (AOS) introduced its AOZ6682CI and AOZ6683CI devices, which are high efficiency, simple-to-use synchronous buck regulators. 

The AOZ6682CI and AOZ6683CI are both available in an ultra-thin, thermally enhanced TSOT23-6 package and deliver 2A and 3A output current, respectively. The new devices offer high efficiency over the full load range, allowing greener power conversion for a variety of consumer electronics applications such as LCD TVs, set-top boxes, high definition Blu-ray disc players and networking terminals.

The new devices incorporate a low resistance synchronous buck power stage that enables up to 95 percent efficiency. Combined with a thermally enhanced package, the AOZ6682CI and AOZ6683CI achieve 10°C cooler operation at full load compared to similar competing devices. 

Under heavy load conditions, the devices operate in a fixed frequency continuous-conduction mode (CCM). At light loads or in standby mode, the devices employ a proprietary pulse energy mode (PEM) control scheme. This control scheme and low quiescent current of 200uA, allows the buck converter design to achieve industry-leading efficiencies of 89% at light loads.

“Modern consumer equipment must achieve less than 0.5W in standby power consumption and this is a tough problem for system designers to solve,” said Kenny Hu, Power IC marketing manager at AOS. “The newest 2A and 3A additions to the EZBuck family simplify this task, offering up to 6% improved efficiency compared to competing devices thanks to low quiescent current and a proprietary power-saving light load control scheme.”

The AOZ6682CI and the AOZ6683CI are immediately available in production quantities with a lead time of 12 weeks. The unit price is $0.42 for the AOZ6682CI and $0.52 for the AOZ6683CI in 1000 pc quantities.

McAfee uses Expert Rules in ENS 10.5.3 to prevent malicious exploits

Expert Rules are text-based custom rules that can be created in the Exploit Prevention policy in ENS Threat Prevention 10.5.3+. Expert Rules provide additional parameters and allow much more flexibility than the custom rules that can be created in the Access Protection policy. It also allows system administration to control / monitor an endpoint system at a very granular level. 

Expert rules do not rely on Use-Mode hooking; hence they have very minimal impact on a system’s performance. This blog post acts as a basic guide to show customers how to create them and which threats they can help block.