Results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Storage Software QView show market closed 2011 with record sales.

Revenue from worldwide storage software sales during the fourth quarter of 2011 increased 10.5% year over year to almost $3.8bn, according to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Storage Software QView.

The research firm says that it is the largest sales for any quarter, which helped to push the full year revenue up 11.6% over 2010 to a record high of $14.16bn.

EMC, IBM, and Symantec took the top three slots in sales with 25.7%, 19.8%, and 15.4% market shares, respectively.

Storage & Device Management and Data Protection & Recovery were instrumental in record sales as these two increased 17.3% and 13.8%, respectively during the quarter.

IDC Storage Software research director Eric Sheppard said despite being a mature market, Data Protection & Recovery sales benefited greatly by the challenges introduced by virtualisation and the requirement to guarantee high standards of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) within these environments.