The disk storage market in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) posted strong year-on-year growth in the second quarter of 2012, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
Within the MEA region, disk revenue was up 11% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2012 to total $2.53 billion. Terabyte capacity increased 48% over the same period. According to IDC, further strong growth in capacity consumption is expected until the end of the year.
''The development of the market reflects heavy industry demand, especially from the enterprise segment, for cloud technologies, the consolidation of existing infrastructure, and the evolution of the industry towards converged solutions,” says storage research analyst Arun Philip, IDC MEA.
“Most of the growth was driven by the realisation of pipeline deals just before the Holy Month of Ramadan started, following extended incubation periods,'' says Philip, adding that enterprise deals across the telecommunications, media and financial services industries contributed to this healthy growth.
According to IDC, key IT decision-makers moved to roll out such projects rather than forgo the remainder of their annual budgets, and Philip is confident this growth will continue into the second half of the year.
The disk storage markets in Nigeria and SA recorded double-digit growth year-on-year, but the North Africa region, which includes Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, did not follow this trend, experiencing a severe slump as a result of political unrest and spiralling inflation. IDC predicts further growth in the region will stem from the steady performance of the mid-market industry tier.
From a protocol perspective, Infiniband displayed strong year-on-year improvements and the iSCSI protocol continued its growth, especially across EMC and Netapp models. Telecoms-industry investments helped drive double-digit growth for NAS protocols, while RAID dominated redundancy with over 97% share of all shipped models.
Among vendors, EMC retained its top spot, taking just over 41% market share, thanks to its solid standing in the enterprise solutions space across MEA. IBM secured second place with more than 16% market share. IBM's strong performance was spurred by the recent establishment of a local office in Qatar and a dedicated research lab in Nairobi. Netapp placed third with just over 12% share, followed by HP and Dell with around 10% and 6% shares, respectively.
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