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A look back at the 2014 data storage market

Last updated:January 2015

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.

2Cloud providers duke it out

Cloud technology continued to evolve in 2014, with Microsoft, Amazon and Google duking it out for the top public cloud vendor title. Cloud providers confronted outages while releasing new features, and companies like EMC and NetApp got into the cloud game with their own acquisitions.

3VMware VSAN makes a big splash

Hyper-converged infrastructure dominated virtual storage news in 2014. The most talked about products were VMware's Virtual SAN (VSAN) and EVO: RAIL, which brought the server virtualization vendor into the storage spotlight. Startups Nutanix and SimpliVity also made headlines with upgrades to their hyper-converged products.

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