The external storage market in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) grew 16.5% year on year to reach $602m in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to International Data Corporation (IDC).
Storage capacity expanded 60.3% from the same quarter in 2010 to 304.7 petabytes, while the overall CEMA external storage market grew 17.9% in 2011 compared to 2010.
EMC with a market share of 38.9% in Q4 was the preferred external storage supplier for many business clients across the CEMA region, followed by IBM with 18.5% share and HP with 18.3% share.
EMC led the market with 37.4% share, followed by HP with 18.6% and IBM with 17.8% of the market in terms of value, in the whole of 2011.
IDC CEMA research manager in storage systems Pavel Roland said storage optimisation technologies such as advanced tiering, deduplication, thin provisioning, and unified architecture have been increasingly affecting the market, but it was the last quarter of the year when they started making a major impact.
"This was demonstrated by huge annual growth or the rising share of solutions like 3PAR, Hitachi VSP, Data Domain, Compellent, VNX/VNXe, and Storwize," Roland said.
IDC said the shortage of hard disk drives due to floods in Thailand had only a slight impact in Q4 of 2011.
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IDC CEMA research analyst of storage systems Marina Kostova said they expect this effect to become more apparent in the first two quarters of 2012, although it will not significantly affect the size and growth of the market in the region.
