Storage management grows 12%

By Staff Writer for Gartner

Johannesburg, 18 Jun 2008

Revenue from the storage management software (SMS) market increased 12.2% from 2006 to 2007, according to Gartner.

The total revenue of SMS jumped from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $10.6 billion the following year. Gartner says this increase is largely due to the strong growth in backup/recovery and data replication software.

Backup and recovery software grew 11.45% in 2007 to $2.6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2006.

"As companies continue to be pressured by the move to virtualisation and the need to make data more easily recoverable and accessible, they have increased spending for updated backup/recovery and data replication software to help with this transition," said Alan Dayley, research director at Gartner. "Organisations are mainly adding application-specific management options, as well as functionality, that improve protection for remote-office data."

The top five SMS vendors of 2007 held more that 74% of the market, and trends indicate that they are gradually eroding market share from the smaller vendors. This is being done mostly through acquisitions and emerging SMS technologies such as archiving, deduplication and virtualisation.

EMC remained the leader with a total of 26.5% of the total software revenue. NetApp showed the strongest growth with a 35.5% increase since 2006. IBM also displayed strong growth with 29.3% year-over-year.

The fastest growing segments were hierarchical storage management (HSM) and archive software, which saw a 29.8% growth in 2007.

"With the amount of data being stored by many large companies doubling every year, the need to reduce total cost of ownership is driving the purchase of HSM and archiving tools that enable better use of storage resources, including taking advantage of different price tiers of storage," said Dayley.