Storage: Year in Review 2010

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It may be viewed as the conservative cousin of data centre technologies but the world of enterprise storage has seen a lot of action throughout 2010.

Whilst the argument for SSDs raged on and floppy disks were killed off, there was always something to talk about, be it the data explosion or acquisition sprees.

IT PRO delves deep into the past 12 months to see what the big headlines were in the storage sphere.

Acquisition happy

This year saw acquisitions both great and small in storage. We could write pages on the deals done including EMC buying Isilon, Dell snatching up Compellent and Quest getting its hands on BakBone. However, there were two deals that really stole the show.

Kicking off the year back in January, the contentious deal for Sun Microsystems came to a close when Oracle finally got all the approvals it needed.

Although most of the action happened in 2009, the deal wasn’t signed off until 27 January and the rest of 2010 saw high profile Sun executives running for the hills and campaigners still fighting against the deal.

But Oracle incorporated the hardware strongly into its strategy and results for the most recent quarter showed revenues had topped $1 billion (£646 million) for an area many didn’t think it cared about.

Now with HP’s ex-chief executive (CEO) Mark Hurd on board, Oracle looks set to continue to integrate the hardware into its business.

The award for biggest acquisition story of 2010 though, not just in storage but in tech as a whole, goes to the fight for 3PAR between Dell and HP.

Dell kicked off the battle when it announced it had done a deal with the relatively little known virtualisation storage company for $1.15 billion at the start of August.

However, HP then ran in with its own offer and the back and forth ensued, with prices for 3PAR soaring through the roof.

When September came, the dust settled and Dell walked away from the deal, leaving HP with the company and a bill for an astonishing $2.35 billion. Was it worth it? Only 2011 will tell…

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