The external storage market for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) fell 7.5% year-on-year to $2.08 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015 (4Q15).
This is according to the International Data Corporation's (IDC's) EMEA Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker for the last quarter of 2015.
The research firm notes that for the year 2015, the external storage systems value in EMEA fell 8.5% to just over $7 billion, from $7.66 billion in 2014.
The traditional hard disk array (HDD) segment in the region continued its double-digit decline in 4Q15, falling 26.2% in user value to take the annual decline in the HDD segment in 2015 to 25.9% to $3.4 billion, says the IDC.
"Considering 2015 as a whole, unfavourable exchange rates had a major impact on performance in EMEA, with year-on-year trends determined by which currency rate was used. There was an 8.5% drop in value in dollars, for example, but a 9.2% increase in euros," says Silvia Cosso, senior analyst, European storage research, IDC.
"But 2015 will mainly be remembered for being the tipping point in the data centre transformation toward a more agile, cost-effective infrastructure, ready to support third platform applications and emerging workloads.
"The adoption of flash was remarkably quick during the year, with flash systems, both HFA and AFA, overtaking HDD-only systems and representing 51% of total value shipped in 2015 versus 40% in 2014. Cloud was also a strong driver of growth, especially in sales of commodity white boxes for public cloud applications, as seen by the 32% year-on-year growth of ODM and converged systems in the enterprise space," adds Cosso.
Meanwhile, the external storage market for the Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) region also experienced poor performance reflected in a 13% year-on-year decline in user value to $586.6 million in 4Q15.
The subdued overall market results could be attributed to the gap between the new data centre workload, cost, and efficiency requirements and the prevailing legacy storage systems, coupled with the disruption caused by vendors' ongoing efforts to transform their strategies, says the IDC.
"Looking at the results, 2015 was one of the worst years for the storage hardware market in CEMA in the past four years, as it again failed to reach the levels of 2012," according to Marina Kostova, senior research analyst, storage systems, IDC CEMA.
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