The external storage market in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) increased by 13.5% to $463m in Q2 2012, according to International Data Corporation (IDC).
In terms of capacity, storage shipment expanded 49.9% during the quarter to 269 petabytes, compared to the same quarter in 2011.
IDC said that despite the unfavorable global and regional economic situation, data storage was not significantly affected by spending cuts.
According to IDC, the market growth came mainly on the back of investments in entry-level and midrange storage solutions.
IDC CEMA research manager in storage systems Pavel Roland said that the economic pressure led to polarised spending in storage, where the least expensive products and those in the high, $150,000 – 249,999 range, were most in demand.
"No matter the size of the business, storage continues to be among the most important IT hardware for companies to operate and survive. Spending is just shifting to lower price bands," Roland said.
EMC led the market with 37% share, followed by IBM with 18.4% and HP with 16.6%.
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IBM overtook HP’s second place in the market share as HP did not perform well in the Middle East but had some large deals in Central and Eastern Europe.
IDC CEMA research analyst of storage systems Marina Kostova said that midrange applications are gradually increasing their share in total shipments and exceeded 54% in Q2 2012.
"In this respect, the CEMA region is ahead of the worldwide external storage market," Kostova said.
"We believe that the focus on dollar per input/output operations per second (IOPS) instead of average sales price per gigabyte, as well as interest in big data-enabled solutions, is influencing this trend."
