Editor's note
How will 2014 be remembered? The year of solid-state drives, cloud backup and all-flash arrays? Or maybe it will be known for the year hyper-converged systems hit their stride and vendors like Hitachi and Unitrends got in on the backup appliance game.
In case you missed any of the highlights, we’ve collected all of our top news and trends in 2014 in one spot to give storage pros a full view of the year -- just as they get started planning the next.
1Flash and cloud see biggest purchases in 2014
Cloud acquisitions and mergers were numerous in 2014, with EMC alone snapping up four cloud storage companies. However, flash technology made up the bigger buys of the year, with SanDisk's billion-dollar acquisition of Fusion-io, and large purchases for Samsung and Seagate.