On April 18, IBM announced the acquisition of Diligent Technologies for an undisclosed amount. Diligent is a storage capacity optimization (SCO) vendor, best known for its enterprise data de-duplication and virtual tape library (VTL) solutions. Data de-duplication is fast becoming a mainstream technology, and our information indicates strong purchase intent over the next 12 months across both the small and medium as well as large enterprise markets. In our Emerging Market Forecast for Next Generation Data Protection Technologies published in December 2006, we stated that if a vendor did not offer SCO technologies in their storage product line by 2008, they would not be able to sell VTL or other secondary storage solutions effectively. This has come to pass even more dramatically than we had forecast.

PMC-Sierra has announced a new family of Tachyon storage protocol controllers featuring StorClad encryption technology. StorClad-enabled Tachyon controllers slot non-disruptively into existing networked storage and integrate with standard encryption technologies to encrypt data behind the controller. The result is a highly scalable, cost-effective, and standardized method for encrypting large and growing amounts of data-at-rest.namespace.