The storage industry is going through its first truly major upheaval since the introduction of centralised storage. Enterprises have years – and millions of dollars – worth of investment in existing fibre channel infrastructure, most of which is underutilised. Novel storage paradigms are being introduced into markets of all sizes. The storage industry is in flux and buying a little time to correctly pick winners could save enterprises millions. Information technology is always changing. Calling any influx of novelty a “major upheaval” is easy to dismiss as overstatement of hype. Deduplication and/or compression were reasonably big deals that came out long after centralised storage, so what makes the current brouhaha so special? The difference is one of “product” versus “feature”. Deduplication or compression were never going to be products in and of themselves for particularly long. It was always destined to evolve into a feature that everyone offered. Today’s storage shakeup is different. Server SANs can do away with the need for centralised storage altogether, threatening to turn enterprise-class storage itself into a feature, not a product. Host-based caching companies are emerging with offerings that range from creating an entirely new, additional layer of storage in your datacenter to injecting themselves into your existing storage fabric without requiring disruption of your network design. We’re at about the halfway point in the storage wars now; the big “new ideas” have all been run up the flag pole and there are a dozen startups fighting the majors to be the best at each of the various idea categories. The “hearts and minds” portion of the war is well underway and that give us a few years until there’s some major shake-up or consolidation. The big fish will eat the small fish. Some companies will rise, others...