But in addition to the trend toward disconnecting logical from physical resources, there were a handful of acquisitions this year that signaled other trends in storage world.

1. Brocade-Foundry

On Dec. 19, Brocade Communications and Foundry Networks completed a deal they had announced in July before navigating the roughest waters the financial and credit markets have seen in a generation. The merger, now valued at $2.6 billion, is intended to address a coming merger of SAN (storage area network) and LAN technology.

SAN builders have long relied on Fibre Channel, a specialized networking technology designed not to drop packets. But in most cases, the rest of the enterprise network is based on Ethernet, which is cheaper than Fibre Channel and now available at higher speeds. Maintaining both requires more adapters on storage equipment and adds to an IT department's workload. The two types of networks are headed toward gradual consolidation under the FCOE (Fiber Channel Over Ethernet) standard, which is intended to make Ethernet reliable enough for storage networks. Then, Ethernet can be the network of choice across data centers and keep getting faster.

Brocade wasn't the only company thinking this way. Cisco, which will be the main competitive target of the merged company, bought out Nuova Systems in April and simultaneously announced a line of routing switches designed to connect the whole data center. The flagship Nexus 7000, which Cisco has positioned as one of its most important products ever, is built to scale to 15T bps (bits per second) and has a virtualized version of IOS (Internetwork Operating System) called NX OS. Like the combination of Brocade and Foundry, the Nexus line is likely to help enterprises virtualize their storage and computing resources and eventually streamline networking and management.