2009: A year of storage acquisitions

2009 was marked again by its storage acquisitions. EMC acquired deduplication vendor Data Domain for $1.2 billion. Dell picked up Perot Systems for $3.9 billion and Oracle topped out 2009 acquisitions with its $7.4 billion bid for ailing Sun. Both the EMC and Oracle acquisitions garnered their share of controversy: EMC outbid NetApp for Data Domain and Oracle contended with the European Union over the acquisition of Sun.

Tech mergers and acquisitions to grow in 2010

In clustered network attached storage, LSI bought up ONStor and HP acquired IBRIX to add to their portfolios of storage products. Backup and recovery software vendors Yosemite, Vizioncore and Asempra were bought up by Barracuda, Quest and Bakbone, respectively.

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2009 was marked again by its storage acquisitions. EMC acquired deduplication vendor Data Domain for $1.2 billion. Dell picked up Perot Systems for $3.9 billion and Oracle topped out 2009 acquisitions with its $7.4 billion bid for ailing Sun. Both the EMC and Oracle acquisitions garnered their share of controversy: EMC outbid NetApp for Data Domain and Oracle contended with the European Union over the acquisition of Sun.

Tech mergers and acquisitions to grow in 2010

In clustered network attached storage, LSI bought up ONStor and HP acquired IBRIX to add to their portfolios of storage products. Backup and recovery software vendors Yosemite, Vizioncore and Asempra were bought up by Barracuda, Quest and Bakbone, respectively.

Exar acquired Hifn for its compression and encryption technology and Alliance Storage Technologies took Plasmon off life support.

QLogic acquired NetZen and entered the 10Gbit Ethernet market. Rackable Systems snapped up SGI and renamed itself SGI. In disk drives, Hitachi GST acquired Fabrik, a vendor of hard disk, solid state drives and RAID systems. Also in drive technology, Toshiba bought out Fujitsu's hard disk drive business and Western Digital acquired solid state drive specialist SiliconSystems.

EMC wasn't done with storage acquisitions in 2009 – in September 2009 it passed over StoredIQ and bought e-Discovery vendor Kazeon. Unify bought archiving vendor AXS-One and F5 picked up Attune, a file virtualization vendor.

LSI bought out AMCC 3Ware, a vendor of Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA controllers and RAID solutions; and Tributary Systems picked up Gresham Enterprise Storage.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.