One of those acquisitions is Emulex buying Sierra Logic (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/30/HNemulexbuyssierralogic_1.html), a deal that would challenge even the most severe judges to come up with criticism.

Why? First of all, there's an undeniable synergy between the two vendors' product lines: Sierra Logic's products facilitate connecting inexpensive SATA drives to a FC infrastructure, which fits Emulex's portfolio (embedded switches, HBAs, and more) like a glove.

Moreover, the two vendors were already cooperating in serving a common pool of customers, which means that those customers will gain the convenience of having a single networked storage provider, consolidating technically complex provisioning.

Looking at the acquisition from the buyer perspective, it's obvious that Sierra Logic is yet another important tile in Emulex's long -- and so far successful -- effort to cover a larger segment of the storage market. In fact, by merging foreign technologies from several acquisitions and partners with its own, Emulex has quietly put together the ability to offer embedded fabric products capable of directing data to several destinations without breaking business applications.

Let's put a familiar label on that mosaic of technologies: storage virtualization (http://www.infoworld.com/reports/03SRstorvirt.html), or rather the seeds from which Emulex customers -- think of any big, tier-one name in storage -- can grow their virtualization landscape.