Industry news

SMS market grows 10%, says Gartner

The worldwide storage management software market (SMS) grew by more than one tenth last year, one analyst has said.

Gartner revealed SMS sales totalled $10.6 billion (£5 billion) in 2007, a 12.2 per cent increase from 2006's $9.4 billion.

The analyst said the market was driven primarily by strong growth in backup and recovery – which grew 11.4 per cent to $2.6 billion – as well as data replication.

Alan Dayley, the analyst's research director, said firms are finding an increasing need for such technologies to make data easily recoverable and accessible as they are pressured to move towards virtualisation.

"Organisations are mainly adding application-specific management options, as well as functionality, that improve protection for remote-office data," he added.

IDC revealed earlier in the month that virtualisation is being pushed to the "forefront" by the European enterprise server market's booming sales.

Gartner revealed earlier in the year that virtualisation will become the most important trend for servers in the near future.