We pick the five must-have storage technologies you'll want in your data centers next year.

Storage managers get pitched a ton of products in the course of a year. A few of them become widely accepted, some survive as niche products important to a select core of users and others disappear soon after their introduction.

To be fair, winning products and technologies (those that change the way a storage manager works to store and protect storage, and retrieve data) aren't easy to spot once they move from labs and beta versions into production environments. To identify the hot technologies for 2008, the editors of Storage pored through scores of new storage products and technologies before arriving at five that promise to make storing data more efficient or eloquently solve a nagging data center problem. This year's picks include LTO-4, which adds increased capacity, speed and AES-256 to ta...

The editors also identified two hot technology areas: ediscovery, which is being driven by the latest Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP); and green storage, a response to soaring electric bills. We also list five technologies we feel need more time to mature and consequently won't be hot in 2008 (see "Not so hot in 2008"). Finally, we review how the predictions we made last year fared (see "Report card: Last year's predictions"). In the discussion that follows, specific vendors or products are mentioned solely as being representative of the particular category.

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