Stories by: Mike Karp

There's trouble in Standardsville, pardner, and it looks like there's a battle a-brewin'. So strap on yer six-shooters, mosey on down to the corral and saddle up them broncs. We got some hard ridin' to do. The Aperi gang may be comin' to town and some of the townsfolk are up in arms.

Some readers may remember efforts during the 1990s by Compaq, HP and IBM to deliver a high-speed serial connection technology called Future I/O. Some may also recall a competing technology -- Next Generation I/O (NGIO) -- from a group consisting of Intel, Microsoft, and Sun. Eventually the two camps merged their efforts to work on what all commonly saw as the next generation of technology for connecting servers and storage.

Predicting the future is perilous business indeed. However, as an industry analyst one of the sad facts of life that I have had to face is the reality that it is awfully hard to find clients willing to pay me to predict the past. This is an unfortunate situation, but it is, alas, the way of things.

Sun's acquisition of StorageTek in June is still in its early days, and by no means has the dust begun to settle. And yet, a few things are becoming clear.

Serial-attached SCSI, serial ATA and the storage reseller community are all going to be great friends.

In San Jose last week, Bell Micro, Fujitsu, LSI Logic and Supermicro got together to hold a coming out party for Serial Attach SCSI, or SAS, the newest incarnation of the SCSI device interface.

Computer Associates has been around in one form or another ever since computers ran on coal. Over the almost 30 years of its history CA has grown - both organically and through frequent acquisitions - into the fifth largest software firm in the world.

On June 2, Sun announced its intent to acquire StorageTek in a cash purchase. At US$4.1 billion, this is one of the largest high-tech acquisitions in recent history, bigger than EMC's US$1.7 billion purchase of Documentum, although far smaller than HP's US$25 billion purchase of Compaq.

Well, the last month of the second quarter is just around the corner, and storage sales reps with quotas to meet are preparing to come knocking on your door. How they size you up will determine which products they pitch to you.

One of the highest priorities for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is to enable IT managers to manage a heterogeneous storage environment from a single, consolidated management point. This will mean that buyers of IT equipment can make hardware purchasing decisions based on features, functionality, serviceability and so forth, but without having to worry about the long-term issue of managing disparate resources from different vendors.