Consolidation, trading barbs

It's been an interesting month in storage

Developments of the week in storage

It's been an interesting month in storage what with all the consolidation happening.

First, Oracle bid for Sun and gave most of Sun storage a new future for OpenStorage, Sun’s Thumper archiving platform and ZFS. Next Broadcom made a bid for Emulex – hostile as it was, if successful will let Broadcom take advantage of Fibre Channel and let it supplement its Ethernet portfolio.

The next rumblings we heard were that EMC would buy QLogic – a rumor no one has been able to substantiate, but one that if it were to occur would give a strong showing for QLogic’s Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and InfiniBand products. Whoops, we forgot that Cisco is supposed to acquire EMC – no more on that rumor, which has quieted down somewhat over the last few weeks.

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It's been an interesting month in storage what with all the consolidation happening.

First, Oracle bid for Sun and gave most of Sun storage a new future for OpenStorage, Sun’s Thumper archiving platform and ZFS. Next Broadcom made a bid for Emulex – hostile as it was, if successful will let Broadcom take advantage of Fibre Channel and let it supplement its Ethernet portfolio.

The next rumblings we heard were that EMC would buy QLogic – a rumor no one has been able to substantiate, but one that if it were to occur would give a strong showing for QLogic’s Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and InfiniBand products. Whoops, we forgot that Cisco is supposed to acquire EMC – no more on that rumor, which has quieted down somewhat over the last few weeks.

Then Dave Donatelli, who was head of EMC’s storage unit at EMC defects to HP where he’ll become executive vice president for enterprise servers, storage, and networking. That is if his lawsuit against EMC to invalidate his non-compete is upheld. Or, if EMC’s suit against Donatelli to uphold his non-compete is found for EMC, we may see Donatelli being barred from managing storage at HP.

To finalize the week, QLogic bought NetXen, a company that can bolster their 10Gbit Ethernet story. What’s up for next week? More consolidation, more trading jobs among competitors, more worries about swine flu?

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

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.