Storage giant EMC has earned its title, according to the latest IDC report on the storage market. The research firm found that sales in this particular industry reached an all time high of almost $3.8 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011. The yearly revenue of $14.16 billion is also the highest recorded to date.

IDC dug deeper, looking into how these numbers break down between the largest vendors out there: EMC came up first, accounting for 25.7 percent of total sales.  Symantec followed with a margin of over 10 percent at 15.4 per cent, and IBM snatched up 14.2 percent of the money companies spent on storage equipment in 2011.

The rest has gone to other players such as HP and Hitachi, along with the “Others” category of assorted smaller vendors. The latter had the largest share of sales.

From The Register:

“CA was included in IDC’s “others” category in the fourth 2010 quarter and has stayed there. Hitachi Data Systems got lumped into that category in 2011’s fourth quarter. HP has dipped in and out of it, which is why it has separated bars on the chart.

It looks as if the “others” category, the highest value green line on the chart, is growing fastest of all, which indicates that the storage software market is less dominated by the major suppliers than the storage hardware market.”

EMC is extending the broad vision of competing in the storage space, and the cloud as a whole, with VCE. The startup is a joint initiative between the company, majority-owned subsidiary VMware and Cisco, proving to be a valuable asset to EMC’s portfolio, even beyond the fiscal perspective.