At the macro level, the Fibre Channel storage systems market is a mature, slow growth segment of the overall storage systems landscape. However, the aggregate view hides a market that is undergoing tremendous architectural and technology transition as end user purchasing criteria shift to emphasize price-performance, energy efficiency, capacity optimization, and simplified storage management. To that end, a new class of systems designs have emerged that offer a simpler, more efficient, and high performance alternative to the traditional monolithic and dual controller based storage system designs that have dominated the landscape for the past decade or more. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TO PURCHASE A COPY, CONTACT INFO@TANEJAGROUP.COM

On April 18, IBM announced the acquisition of Diligent Technologies for an undisclosed amount. Diligent is a storage capacity optimization (SCO) vendor, best known for its enterprise data de-duplication and virtual tape library (VTL) solutions. Data de-duplication is fast becoming a mainstream technology, and our information indicates strong purchase intent over the next 12 months across both the small and medium as well as large enterprise markets. In our Emerging Market Forecast for Next Generation Data Protection Technologies published in December 2006, we stated that if a vendor did not offer SCO technologies in their storage product line by 2008, they would not be able to sell VTL or other secondary storage solutions effectively. This has come to pass even more dramatically than we had forecast.