Cisco/NetApp Lone Vendor Showing Growth In Converged Systems Market

Researcher International Data Corp. came out June 22 with its Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, showing that the worldwide converged systems market revenues increased 4.6 percent year over year to $2.67 billion during the first quarter of 2017.

The market consumed 1.48 exabytes of new storage capacity during the quarter, which was up only 7.1 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

Dell EMC maintained its Q1 2017 segment leadership with 47.2 percent of marketshare ($647.8 million in sales), down a tad (-2.9 percent) from a year ago. Cisco/NetApp, whose combined Flexpod data center product is the best-selling one in the market, was No. 2 with 28.8 percent marketshare and $395.6 million in sales.

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, third at 15 percent marketshare and $206.2 million in sales, was down 29 percent in sales year over year. All others totaled 9 percent marketshare and $122.8 million, down 16 percent YOY in sales.

Storage wars

With revenue growth of 26.1 percent, Cisco/NetApp was the only vendor in the top three to show positive sales growth year over year in the category.

“Converged systems have become an important source of innovation and growth for the data center infrastructure market,” said IDC’s Eric Sheppard, research director of Enterprise Storage and Converged Systems. “These solutions represent a conduit for the key technologies driving much needed data center modernization and efficiencies, such as flash, software-defined infrastructure and private cloud platforms.”

IDC’s converged systems market view offers four segments: integrated infrastructure, certified reference systems, integrated platforms, and hyperconverged systems. Integrated infrastructure and certified reference systems are pre-integrated, vendor-certified systems containing server hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment, and basic element/systems management software.

Integrated Platforms are integrated systems that are sold with additional pre-integrated packaged software and customized system engineering optimized to enable such functions as application development software, databases, testing, and integration tools. Hyperconverged systems collapse core storage and compute functionality into a single, highly virtualized solution.

A key characteristic of hyperconverged systems that differentiate these solutions from other integrated systems is their scale-out architecture and their ability to provide all compute and storage functions through the same x86 server-based resources.

IDC defines converged and hyperconverged systems as pre-integrated, vendor-certified systems containing server hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment, and basic element/systems management software. Systems not sold with all four of these components are not counted within this tracker.

Specific to management software, IDC includes embedded or integrated management and control software optimized for the auto discovery, provisioning and pooling of physical and virtual compute, storage and networking resources shipped as part of the core, standard integrated system.

Originally published on eWeek

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