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As the storage industry consolidates, IT managers should see, when all the dust settles, tighter integration with security and improved storage standards support.
Symantec and Veritas, Network Appliance and Decru, and Hewlett-Packard and AppIQ highlighted the years acquisitions. At $13.5 billion, the merger of Symantec and Veritas was the biggest transaction of the bunch.
Integrated data management tools will allow IT managers to find and repair problems from a single console.
Unlike the Symantec-Veritas merger, the NetApp purchase of security appliance vendor Decru yielded benefits almost immediately and did not require large amounts of integration work.
By bundling NetApps SnapLock WORM technology with the Decru security appliances, IT managers can implement a storage solution that provides encryption and long-term data retention.
With end-to-end data management becoming such an important goal for IT managers, I expect to see even more mergers and partnerships forming between storage and security vendors in the near future.
Senior Analyst Henry Baltazar can be reached at henry_baltazar@ziffdavis.com.
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