The market for customised backup appliances reached $1 billion worldwide in the fourth quarter of last year.
This market represents standalone disk products that use software, disk arrays, server engines, and more specifically data coming from backup software.
IDC said that the market for this kind of kit rose by four percent in 2014 and generated revenues of $3.26 billion.
Annual capacity in 2014 rose by 42.8 percent compared to 2013 to a staggering 2.68 exabytes.
Liz Conner, a research manager at IDC, said reasons for the rise in revenues included better software, data tiering, file sharing, data analytics and more investment in integrated systems.
In the fourth quarter, top of the storage pile was EMC with 63.8 percent market share, dwarfing the other players Symantec (11.5%), IBM (6.7%), HP (4%) and Quantum (2.3%).
