Businesses increasingly need to protect and secure the information they collect and that demand is driving the growth in the replication, backup and archiving segments of the storage software market, IDC said. The growing volume of software sales in those segments is also being driven by demand from businesses to protect their data throughout the business cycle, it said.

Sales in those segments helped drive the overall worldwide storage software market to grow by 12.6 percent in 2005, with revenue reaching US$8.9 billion for the year, IDC found.

An earlier IDC report in February noted that an explosion of data and the availability of storage systems that help tackle data protection and business continuity issues drove a record year of growth for the disk storage systems market in 2005.

External disk storage system sales worldwide jumped nearly 18 percent to US$4.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005 from the prior year-ago quarter, and for the year grew 12 percent to $16 billion from the prior year, IDC said.

Sales of midrange systems, which IDC defines as priced between $50,000 and $149,999, were especially strong, noted IDC.