According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced another decline in year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09) with revenues of $2.87 billion, representing –7.9% growth over the same quarter one year ago, but a 1.2% growth from the previous quarter (2Q09).

IDC report shows EMC led the overall market with 23.4% revenue share in the third quarter of 2009. Symantec held onto the second position with 17.8% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 12.2% revenue share.

EMC Corporation has finally overcome rival NetApp and succeeded with its bid to buy data deduplication leader Data Domain at a price of USD $2.1 billion.
The acceptance of the final offer comes after a six-week bidding war and will raise questions about whether EMC overpaid for Data Domain - and what NetApp will do now.

EMC Corporation has extended its all-cash tender offer to purchase all outstanding shares of Data Domain common stock for USD $30 per share.
The move is to provide additional time to satisfy closing conditions, the offering period now expires at 12:00 midnight EDT on July 10, 2009.

DataCore Software has announced that hosted IT-as-a-service company External IT has standardized on its SANsymphony storage virtualization software to serve as their storage area network (SAN).
With VMware virtual servers, Citrix XenApp and DataCore storage virtualization, it allows External IT to deliver a complete virtualization infrastructure.

Storage software revenue has experienced its first quarterly year-over-year decline in more than five years, according to IDC.
The analysts' Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker showed that the device management, replication and infrastructure categories had the biggest declines.

The bidding war for Data Domain stepped up this week after NetApp raised the stakes with rival EMC by making a new cash and stock offer of USD $1.9 billion.
This came two days after EMC's offer of USD $30 per share in a deal worth about USD $1.8 billion - around 20 per cent over the original USD $1.5 billion offered last month by NetApp.

EMC Symmetric VMax is the latest breakthrough technology from EMC. It provides for a virtual data center with high end storage and scales up to 2 PB of usable protected capacity, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.
Unlike alternate arrays, it equips its customers with an ability to consolidate workloads with a comparatively small footprint.
These systems will be available immediately.

Well, it was only a matter of time. The data storage market has slowed down - and much more than anticipated, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.
IDC revealed last week that global external disk storage systems' factory revenues dropped by a half per cent in the fourth quarter.

The Federal government has announced in a statement that Data Storage giant, EMC is being investigated over its pricing and improper contract practices.
EMC revealed in its annual report with the SEC several days ago that the US justice Department had filed a lawsuit against the company, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

Just a few months ago, Sun Microsystems revealed the availability of its new Unified Storage System - the Sun Storage 7000 family.
Described as the world's first Open Storage Appliance, Sun claims the Storage 7000 family is the "biggest thing to happen to storage in decades", writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz-news.