The worldwide storage software market is growing, according to a report issued today by International Data Corporation. The global market ended the fourth quarter of 2010 with revenues of $3.4 billion, a 10.6 percent increase over the same quarter one year ago, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth for the market.

The storage infrastructure market experienced the highest calendar year growth of 23.6 percent, which took the functional market to $1.2 billion in total sales. Data protection and recovery remained the largest functional market by a considerable margin. Sales in this market segment surpassed $4.4 billion for the year, which was an increase of 11.2 percent.

The largest single vendor was EMC, which notched up storage software revenue of $866 million, up 18 percent from a year earlier. Symantec ranked second but achieved just 0.1 percent growth, at $543 million. IBM and NetApp both follow with revenues of $442.9 million and $311.7 million respectively. Hitachi had the largest increase among the top five companies, 47 percent, with $148.4 million in revenue.

The storage software market has been growing since late 2009 and is the midst of a “sustained recovery,” according to Eric Sheppard, research director with IDC’s Storage Software program.

“The storage software market is in the midst of a sustained recovery, which is partly driven by new product innovations, and partly by a strong desire to address inefficiencies related to storing, protecting, and managing corporate data,” Sheppard said. “A considerable increase in storage software designed to enable automated storage tiering, coupled with a continued market trend of addressing aging, inefficient storage deployments were two important drivers of market growth during the quarter.”