Over the course of the last few years no part of the IT landscape has developed as rapidly as that of storage and storage management. Even the rapidly developing virtualisation sectors would struggle to keep pace with the speed of change in the storage market, especially when it comes to vendor acquisition. Just take a look at the last few days. Last Thursday saw EMC announce plans to acquire Document Sciences Corporation, yesterday had IBM announcing that it had acquired XIV whilst today saw NetApp releasing details of its definitive agreement to acquire Onaro. Three acquisitions made by three of the heavyweight storage players, each in a slightly different area of the market. There is no doubt at all that storage in 2008 is once again going to be an area of high activity.

It is interesting to note carefully the areas selected in these acquisitions. EMC's purchase of Document Sciences Corporation for around $85 million will see the company add significant document output management (DOM) capabilities to its already extensive content and document management portfolio. IBM's procurement of XIV for an undisclosed sum (though rumoured to be in the region of $300–$350 million) sees Big Blue get hold the Nextra system and grid based storage architecture that is targeted to provide high performance storage with very high availability and simplicity of management. On completion, the purchase of Onaro by NetApp for will see the company acquire sophisticated storage workflow automation, storage service management and change management capabilities, all valuable to organisations struggling to administer ever increasing volumes of data.

Of the three, it is relatively straight forward to plot how EMC and NetApp can exploit their acquisitions. It will be much more fascinating to note how IBM takes advantage of XIV, to note how much it will influence fundamental storage architectures produced by them, to see how quickly these changes become visible and to how pervasive the influence of XIV becomes.

These developments highlight yet again the fact that storage management is today a challenge for enterprises of all scales and that few organisations have confidence in their existing storage environments and are even less certain of their ability to manage, cost-effectively, with minimum risk at an affordable cost, these ever growing systems. I fully expect there to be more significant vendor acquisitions over the course of the next twelve months in the storage arena.