IDC released today that the worldwide storage market grew significantly in the fourth quarter of 2004. According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the growth is 15% year-over-year to $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2004.

The report shows that for the full year 2004, storage software revenue grew 16.1% year over year to $7.9 billion, injecting more than a billion dollars of new revenue into the marketplace.

"The storage software market ended on a very positive note, continuing its momentum of double-digit growth. This pattern is fueled by the increased business investment in data protection and management, as well as a greater awareness of compliance requirements," said Bill North, research director for Storage Software at IDC.

The monitoring shows that while the back-up and archive software market continued to represent the largest functional market, growing 9.5% year over year.

"The strong growth rate for storage resource management is a result of the need to manage the increasing scale and complexity of storage systems as well as the heterogeneous storage environment," added North.

According to the report, EMC led the overall market this quarter with 31.7% revenue share, gaining the greatest year-over-year market share among the top 5 vendors.

The monitoring results show VERITAS to maintaine its second position with 21.7% revenue share, growing 11.4% year-over-year. Among the other top performers, Computer Associates and IBM finished in a statistical tie for the third position, with 8.8% and 8.2% revenue share, respectively. HP rounded out the top 5 with 6.6% revenue share for the quarter. EMC and IBM posted the strongest quarterly results among the top 5 vendors, with 25.1% and 16.7% year-over-year growth, respectively.

Meanwhile Netcraft reported Fedora, the community-driven Linux distribution started by RedHat, is the fastest growing Linux distribution in the web server survey.

According to the Netcraft's report, Fedora has outpaced all its rivals over the last six months, growing fastest both in absolute numbers and in relative terms.

RedHat's strategy of reserving the RedHat brand for its commercial offerings, while using community-driven development in Fedora to try new features, seems to be working well. While share for RedHat itself is falling, taken together with Fedora its share is around 50% and rising slightly.

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