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Storage technologies such as data replication, deduplication and hierarchical storage management (HSM)/archiving give organizations new opportunities to more efficiently store corporate data and create reliable disaster recovery strategies. The rising demand for these products is contributing to the overall growth of the storage management software (SMS) market, according to research firm Gartner Inc.

SMS is designed to help organizations more efficiently and centrally manage and use the data in their various storage systems. The market for SMS clearly is growing. Gartner surveyed 144 individuals from end-user organizations at its Data Center Conference in November 2007, and 52 percent of the respondents said their organization would spend more on SMS in 2007 than it did in 2006.

Gartner forecasts the worldwide SMS market to grow at an 8 percent compound annual growth rate between 2007 and 2012. The firm includes backup and recovery software, device resource management, data replication, storage resource management, core storage management, and HSM and archiving software in its measurement of the SMS market.

The bulk of SMS spending continues to be in the distributed storage rather than mainframe environment, Gartner says. Other key findings of the survey were that replication continues to gain importance in the data recovery process, with at least 77 percent of the organizations surveyed planning to either augment or replace backup with replication in the next 12 months; and although only 17 percent of the respondents now use data deduplication during backup, nearly 50 percent were considering implementing the technology in 2008.

The demand for SMS products actually dipped in 2006 but then rebounded last year, largely because of a surge in backup and recovery software, says Alan Dayley, research director, Software Market Research Team, at Gartner. “Part of that is driven by newer technologies including deduplication,” storage virtualization and replication, Dayley says. Also contributing to the increased need for SMS is the growing volume of archived data for regulatory compliance purposes, he says.

Several key short-term market drivers are fueling the demand for SMS, according to a report Gartner published in April. These include a need to reduce total cost of ownership that will drive the purchase of tools to increase operational efficiency; regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Basel II and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which are driving additional IT spending across the different SMS disciplines; increased demand for improved quality of service using software rather than labor-based service; tighter storage budgets, which motivates organizations to acquire tools needed to better manage storage resources; and service-level agreements that are driving the modernization of storage.

Vendors that provide storage management products include EMC, IBM, Symantec, Hewlett-Packard, NetApp and Hitachi.

Among the key benefits of SMS is that it helps organizations to manage the incredible growth of data within enterprises, Dayley says. “They have all this data, and they have to figure out the best way to get it stored so that it doesn’t cause disruptions” to the business, he says.

With effective storage management, IT can help ensure that workers are able to access the information they need when they need it and from wherever they are working.

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