...and will probably enter an era of cold consolidation, as giant Dell has bought 3PAR. That means this space is now almost exclusively taken up by the big boys: HP, IBM, and Hitachi Data Systems (which, admittedly, is the odd one out). Still, it is yet another sign that the entire data center will be consolidated to a couple of large vendors, where the only way for them to survive is by being gobbled up by one of the IT giants.

3PAR is, in many respects, such a wonderful company. Its strength lies in the design of its clustered high-end Fibre Channel enterprise class storage systems. By using ASIC-based hardware and virtualisation layers, the performance of 3PAR kit is quite renowned. Also, it is easy to manage.

Probably, that will continue now that Dell has taken over, and the products will be running alongside the Dell EqualLogic range. It cost Dell a pretty sum (1.15 billion dollars), but that apparently is how much innovation is worth nowadays.

As The Register mentions, the next logical step would be to be an ethernet switch vendor, but Brocade would be too obvious for my taste. Maybe Juniper? Who knows.

There is one disturbing aspect here: clearly, it shows how poor the large vendors are in thinking up something new themselves. On the other hand: has it ever been different?