EMC spent $2.1 billion on data deduplication market leader Data Domain, but other companies weren't so successful with their acquisition plans in the storage industry in 2009.

IBM adds solid-state, SATA and encryption support for the DS8000, as well as new ProtecTier appliances and a "baby" XIV Storage System.

LeftHand Networks' iSCSI SANs will be delivered as HP appliances only, including a new low-end SAS configuration.

Sign of the times: Attune's intellectual property went on the auction block in December, and has been absorbed into F5's file virtualization portfolio.

EMC has confirmed it acquired assets, including people, from SourceLabs for its cloud computing group, but hasn't provided details about how the assets will be used.

It's not just the start of a new year—soon there will also be a new president in office. Storage vendors, analysts and users offer their advice to the new administration.

Cisco Systems Inc. is making its Fibre Channel SAN switches aware of the virtual machines attached to them through joint development with VMware Inc. "The virtual machine has become the atomic unit of the data center," said Rajeev Bhardwaj, director of product management. The update to Cisco's NX-OS switch operating system means that VMware ESX Servers connected through MDS 9000 fabric switches using NPIV can have separate logins and separate VSANs. ESX Servers can also be given access to multiple VSANs on an individual level, rather than being grouped by physical host.

HP offers block storage virtualization for its midrange EVA and MSA disk arrays through IP from LSI's Storage Virtualization Manager (SVM) software.

Brocade's 8 Gb host bus adapters begin to find a home in organizations already using its Fibre Channel switches, although major storage vendors have yet to certify the HBAs with their arrays.

With a unified SAS system supporting iSCSI and NAS, Reldata looks to compete in the midmarket with simple management and heterogeneous disk support.