The storage market is going through huge changes. Sun's £2.4bn acquisition of StorageTek in June was the latest in a wave of consolidation to hit the sector, including possibly the biggest ever software acquisition: Symantec's purchase of Veritas for £7.7bn last December. This last deal illustrates a salient feature of the storage market in the second half of 2005. The fact that Veritas - a Unix storage provider - is being acquired by Symantec - a Windows security player - signifies a move away from pure-play storage towards information lifecycle management, an approach that addresses the management of data from cradle to grave. Just as the storage industry has for years been chasing the holy grail of virtualisation and consolidation of storage assets, the industry now finds itself being consolidated: and some unexpected bedfellows have resulted. So what exactly is happening and why? And what will be the effect on users? Three examples -EMC, Sun and Symantec - and the various ways they are combining are an illustration of new directions in the storage sector. In fact, it would be true to say the storage sector is becoming a thing of the past with the move towards management of the lifecycle of documents and data from the moment they come through the firewall until compliance regimes dictate you no longer need to store them.
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