The EMEA Q3 2016 external storage market remains soft, IDC reports-- revenues are down by -5.1% Y-o-Y to $1.49 billion, as "huge growth" in the flash segment fails to offset falling traditional HDD-only arrays.

In fact, all-flash systems see 76.4% Y-o-Y growth, while hybrid flash arrays are up by 3.5%. However HDD-only array revenues are down by 33.6 Y-o-Y, heavily affecting total EMEA market performance.

"Contingent factors such as macroeconomic volatility and turmoil on the supply side, coupled with acceleration in cloud deployment and infrastructure consolidation, is pushing the EMEA market into negative territory for the 7th quarter in a row," IDC remarks. "On the bright side, the AFA segment kept very strong momentum in the region, almost doubling its shares compared to the same period a year ago, further improving workload consolidation."

QNAP forms a partnership with ElephantDrive to integrate the latter's cloud backup solution with the former's storage hardware, specifically the latest 64-bit QNAP NAS.

According to the two companies the solution enables direct backups from NAS to the cloud, and unifies local and cloud storage for a superior user experience. ElephantDrive also includes administrative tools for data versioning and archiving, and allows file access and sharing from the cloud anytime and anywhere, on any device.

Seagate announces the IronWolf Pro-- a NAS HDD aimed at small-to-midsize enterprises wanting manage large amounts of data, as well as workload rates reaching up to 300TB per year.

Designed as an everything business NAS, the IronWolf is optimised with AgileArray to enhance performance in file-sharing, backup and private cloud environments. The technology helps balancing through dual-plane balance and rotational vibration sensors, RAID optimisation for increased performance and advanced power management.

The company also includes its Rescue Data Recovery service to cover accidental damage, as well as damage caused by natural disasters of the fire or flood variety.

LaCie announces a pair of enterprise storage solutions featuring Thunderbolt 3 connectivity-- the 12big and 6big, both offering speeds of up to 2600MB/s via RAID 5/6 controller.

According to the company, such speeds come through the combination of the hardware RAID controller, 256MB cache and 7200RPM Seagate enterprise-class drives. This makes the drives ideal for photography professionals moving large amounts of RAW footage from a Blackmagic camera to a Adobe Premiere, before editing multiple ProRes 422 (HQ), ProRes 444 XQ and even uncompressed HD 10-bit and 12-bit video streams.

The included HDDs are designed to operate 24x7 on 16-bay tracks and are rated for 8760 hours of operation per year. The enclosure is in aluminium, with front-accessible drives allowing for quick drive replacement.