Disk storage revenue in EMEA reached $2.26 billion in the first quarter of 2012, indicating a 17.25% increase in comparison to the same period last year.
This was revealed in IDC's EMEA Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, which measures markets in terms of new storage capacity shipped, factory value and the end-user value of shipments.
Storage capacity shipped, which is expressed in terabytes, increased 41% this year. IDC attributes this to the increasing adoption of cloud computing technologies, trends in mobility, a need for analytics and the prevalence of social networking.
Growth has been sluggish in the Middle East as a result of the region's economic environment. The North African region - which includes Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia - as well as Nigeria and SA all registered double-digit growth year-on-year. This was attributed to deals across the telecoms, banking and manufacturing sectors, which have boosted the need for storage solutions due to increasing data volumes.
According to IDC, there has also been a gradual shift from DAS and NAS protocols, which go hand-in-hand with growth in iSCI protocols and InfiniBand - especially across Dell and EMC models.
EMC has maintained its top spot in the vendor market, with a market share of nearly 40%, according to the report. IDC cites EMC's solid standing in enterprise solutions as a reason for this.
Netapp secured the number two vendor position, with more than 16% market share; HP placed third, with just over 14%; and IBM and Dell followed with around 12% and 7%, respectively.
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