The worldwide integrated infrastructure & platforms market experienced an impressive 50.2% year-over-year factory value growth during the second calendar quarter of 2013 (2Q13), totaling $1.3 billion in system sales.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure & Platform Tracker, the market generated 529.6 petabytes of new storage capacity shipments during the quarter, which was up 60.5% compared to the second quarter of 2012.
IDC defines integrated infrastructure and platforms 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.
Eric Sheppard, Research Director, Storage of IDC said: “IT departments around the world are increasingly turning to integrated systems to improve utilization rates of their infrastructure, reduce time to deployment of new applications, ease infrastructure management burdens, and reduce the risk of downtime.
“The wide-ranging benefits associated with integrated systems are helping to drive interest in the technology and ultimately very high market value growth rates.”
Also speaking, Jed Scaramella, research director, Enterprise Servers, “Integrated systems adoption is rapidly moving from evaluation to mainstream use, with customers increasingly deploying Tier 1 applications.
“Progressive companies view integrated systems as a means to optimize their IT environments so IT services can be better leveraged by their business units to increase workforce productivity, drive revenue opportunities, and connect with their customers.”
Integrated platform systems 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. Since early iterations of this IDC Tracker will focus only on the core infrastructure of these systems, software is excluded from market sizing.
Sales of Integrated Platform Systems generated $539.4 million in sales during the quarter, which represented 21.1% year-over-year growth and 59.0% of the total market value. Oracle was the largest supplier of Integrated Platform Systems with $305.9 million in sales, or 56.7% share of the market segment.
Integrated infrastructure systems are designed for general-purpose, distributed workloads that are likely to have differing performance profiles.
While integrated infrastructure is similar to integrated platforms in that it will leverage the same infrastructure building blocks, it is not optimized for a specific workload.
Integrated infrastructure sales were up 80.3% year over year during the second quarter on $775.7 million worth of sales (41.0% of the total market value).
The Cisco and NetApp partnership that brings the FlexPod systems to market (referred to as Cisco/NetApp in the above table) generated $203.1 million worth of Integrated Infrastructure sales during the quarter, representing a 26.2% share and the top ranking within this market segment.