Big Data will become an important slice of the server market in the next few years, claims IDC which says that Big Data-related server shipments will increase from 6% of all servers shipped in EMEA in 2015 to 16% by 2019, and server values from $1bn in 2015 to $2.7bn by 2019.
IDC has completed what it says is an in-depth market sizing of the EMEA Big Data infrastructure market focusing on servers, storage, and cloud resources used for Big Data-related activities. These include value creation from merging different data sources, various analytics, log files, and metadata that help identify patterns and generate predictions.
While most current Big Data projects are starting off in companies' own data centres, analytics workloads are increasingly being moved to the public cloud while sensitive data needs to remain on-premises in many cases for compliance reasons, it says.
IDC expects the public cloud infrastructure share of Big Data workloads to increase from 13% of server shipments in 2015 to 34% by 2019, and new storage capacity deployed on public cloud infrastructure to increase from 25% of Big Data workloads in 2015 to 55% by 2019. Most customers are expected to deploy some form of hybrid solution.
"Big Data and analytics have risen to the top of executives' and developers' agendas as the technology has evolved and mindsets are starting to change in organisations in EMEA," said Andreas Olah, senior research analyst, European Datacentres and Big Data, IDC.
"The main challenge is not the data or its volume, but the ability to generate value from it. Many customers are still at the beginning of their journey and still don't know where to start. Others have high ambitions and clear ideas but are slowed down by increasing complexities and the lack of highly skilled data scientists and developers."
Big Data can no longer be ignored in European organisations in view of heightened competition from disruptive market entrants, Olah added. "While a lot of the focus is on choice of applications, it is crucial to get your infrastructure right to unlock and merge various data sources for value creation while avoiding running out of capacity or going over budget," he said.
"Data and analytics-focused workloads require a different infrastructure setup than traditional applications with features such as in-memory computing, large storage pools attached to servers, linkages to cloud resources, and denser architectures for greater efficiency."