Top Storage Bytes of 2005

Its been a full year of M&A, technology introductions (and disruptions), and enough news bytes to make you wish you had your own virtualized memory. As we prepare to drop the curtain on the year that was, we offer up the 10 most widely read stories on Byte and Switch in the last 12 months.

The common thread that runs through almost all of them: Money. Yeah, big surprise.

Click your way through our most heavily trafficked news stories of 2005:

1: Google Groans Under Data Strain

Poor, poor Google. Maybe that $1 billion stake in America Online will help them deal with the happy problem of so much data from Google Earth and a bunch of other surprising applications the company has up its sleeve.

2: Souping Up SATA
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) generated a lot of hype this year, but improvements to SATA will likely have a far greater impact on users. SATA has already sparked quite a buzz around disk-based backup technologies such as virtual tape and continuous data protection. The cheap disk technology put more pressure on the Fibre Channel market with its pinkie than all the iSCSI vendors combined.3: 2004 Top Ten: CEO Payouts
Hall of Fame or rogues’ gallery? Nothing like the subject of how much other people make to pique the curiosity in storage or any industry.

4: Investors React to McData-CNT Chatter
Who said talk is cheap? It was enough to push up the share price of CNT more than 15 percent in advance of its acquisition by McData.

5: Is Brocade Going Private?

Bad year for a company that had to deal with an SEC and Department of Justice investigation (ongoing), restating its earnings, and the unpleasant business of executive turnover. Its board of directors and shareholders probably would have preferred a little privacy.

6: NetApp 'Kinda Screwed Up'
Hands-down, our award winner for the most self-effacing quote from any storage executive all year. That sort of thing doesn't come easily to any CEO, but we tip our virtual hat to Network Appliance's Dan Warmenhoven for a refreshing moment of candor.

7: McData Bags CNT for $235M
What? All those investment bankers were wrong when they said no deal was imminent? Well, at least they were right about the deal not making sense.8: 2004 Top Ten: On the Hot Seat
The CEOs of Hewlett-Packard and Engenio didn't make it through the year, and a couple others still haven't solved the problems that landed them on the list. But change can be good. Engenio is again a profitable part of LSI Logic, and HP's Mark Hurd may be the having the last laugh this year.

9: Xiotech Regroups
Another vendor that's probably grateful to see 2005 end and look ahead to brighter things in the year ahead, like fewer legal problems, more market traction, and some uptake of its SAN application strategy.

10: Brocade Blasts 'Consultant' Reyes

Another low note in the Brocade saga, as its board struggled to justify paying out big bucks to a departed CEO allegedly acting as a "consultant" to the company. That $910,000 annual fee was a hefty hourly rate by any measure.

Still not sated? Longing for more storage nostalgia? Try these honorable mentions:

11: Brocade Switches CEOs, Restates
Think we're piling on here? This was one of the early chapters in the Year of the Auditors.12: Sun to Acquire StorageTek for $4.1B
We didn't laugh when Sun got called the Jack Kevorkian of storage. We're still waiting to see if the vendor can redefine "rolling the tape."

13: McData Cuts & Shuffles

At least we were spared the "wants to spend more time with his/her family" statements as McData's CFO and top engineering exec headed for the door.

14: Fibre Channel Doomed, Says Metcalfe
Yes, it's just going to curl up and die because Ethernet never met a networking segment it couldn't devour. StoneFly's VCs were drinking that same Kool-Aid.

15: Cisco Said to Resell EMC NAS
Maybe this is what fueled all the feverish (and ultimately idle) speculation about a merger of these two companies.Had enough? Us too. Didn't see your favorite headline highlighted? Drop me a quick line here, and let me know what we omitted.

Happy holidays to all from the staff of Byte and Switch.

— Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: