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Last of the storage independents

A recent frenzy of storage acquisitions--with 3PAR going to HP, Isilon to EMC, and now Compellent to Dell--brings storage full-circle. Your next enterprise storage purchase? Almost guaranteed to be from a leviathan.

One of the once-amazing changes in the computer business was the birth of independent storage vendors. For decades there've been a few odd after-market and third-party storage vendors. But they were mere pilot fish congregating around the truly big, important swimmers: systems vendors. When you bought storage, it generally came from the same company that made your computer. That was the natural order.

But in the 1990s, … Read more