IDC: EMEA flash market edging towards the $3bn mark

External flash storage market grows by 32 per cent annually in 2014

The EMEA external flash market rocketed by almost a third in 2014, according to IDC, which predicts the market value for the year will reach $2.9bn (£1.92bn).

Western Europe accounted for the lion's share of the total EMEA flash market value in 2014 – 75 per cent – thanks to strong adoption in the UK, Germany, France, the Nordics, and Benelux regions.

Silvia Cosso, western European storage analyst at IDC, said: "European organisations have quickly adopted flash storage systems for their performance-sensitive workloads.

"Now that all the major vendors have flash-powered arrays in their portfolio, and start-ups continue to push all-flash array (AFA) into the market, competitive differentiation will come from data management capabilities and price."

The analyst predicted that the total flash-optimised market value will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15 per cent between 2013 and 2018.

IDC expects the AFA market to grow much faster than this, at a CAGR of 58 per cent in the same period, and predicts it will make up 15 per cent of EMEA's total flash market by 2018.

Earlier this month, IDC said the global-flash-based array market grew to $11.3bn thanks to an increased push from traditional storage vendors such as Dell, EMC and HP.