The worldwide storage software market increased 6.3% year over year during the second calendar quarter of 2014 (2Q14), according to IDC (www.idc.com). Revenue during the quarter totaled nearly US$3.8 billion, says the research group.

EMC, IBM, and Symantec were the top ranking storage software suppliers with market shares of 25.9%, 16.0%, and 13.3%, respectively. Data Protection & Recovery software sales were up 10.2% year over year to $1.45 billion in sales. Sales of Storage Infrastructure Software were up 10.8% year over year to $448 million. And Storage & Device Management Software sales were up 4.1% year over year to $708 million.

"The storage software market experienced broad growth across most functional markets in the second quarter," says Eric Sheppard, research director, Storage Software at IDC. "Sales of data protection and recovery software accounted for almost 60% of the net-new spending during the quarter, driven by a market-wide move to improve application resiliency, continued uptake in appliance-based offerings, and healthy attach rates within the integrated systems market."  

The second quarter of 2014 marks the first time IDC has measured the size of the software-defined storage platforms (SDS-P) market. Sales of SDS-P were just 3.5% of the total market value, but grew more than 15.7% during the quarter.

Software-defined storage platforms is a new functional market added to the total storage software market that covers block, file, object, and/or hyperconverged software offerings that enable the creation of a storage system. IDC refers to software-defined storage as platforms that deliver the full suite of storage services via a software stack that uses (but is not dependent on) commodity hardware built with off-the-shelf components