The sales volume of the worldwide storage software market climbed 10.0 percent year over year and topped $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2005, according to market research firm IDC. Q3 marked the eighth consecutive quarter in which the industry achieved double-digit year-over-year growth.

IDC said that the storage replication market turned out to be strongest segment of storage software with a gain of 16.8 percent. File systems software followed with 15.6 percent. The largest segment, the back-up and archive market came in at a healthy plus of 12.7 percent.

"We see strong demand in the backup and archive and replication segments driven by fundamental user requirements to protect, recover, and retrieve information, not only in the data center but also in remote and branch office locations," said Laura DuBois, research director for Storage Software at IDC. "This demand is in response to drivers such as application availability and business continuance, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance."

EMC led the overall market this quarter with 29.1 percent revenue share. Symantec, with its recent of acquisition of Veritas, took the second position with 20.0 percent, while IBM finished in the third position with 9.4 percent. Network Appliance and HP rounded out the top 5 with 6.9 percent and 6.7 percent revenue share, respectively.