Reviewing The Year's Storage News Highlights

Over the past couple of weeks, I slogged through the usual endless series of storage-related "best of" and prediction articles. Finally, here's one that is actually worth sharing.SearchStorage.com writer Beth Pariseau really delivered the goods with her list of the top 10 enterprise data storage news stories of 2009. Her list includes:

- The rapidly expanding role of data deduplication technology. - An explosion in new solid-state drive options, combined with relatively slow adoption of these products. - A "NAS renaissance" as cheap, feature-rich network-attached storage products flood the market. - The cloud computing hype bomb explodes, leaving a trail of buzzwords and vague promises in its wake.

The whole list is worth a closer look; it includes links to a number of relevant new stories for each topic.

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The list misses a few stories that aren't quite big news just yet -- although I am confident that they will be soon. Perhaps the best example is the growth of 10Gb Ethernet technology, which is now on the verge of moving into the mass-market mainstream. As storage guru Henry Newman points out, the combination of 10GbE, cheap but powerful NAS boxes, and innovative new data deduplication products will push increasingly powerful storage technologies down into the SMB and consumer markets.