In its third storage acquisition in short order, IBM proved the rumor mill right Friday by snapping up deduping VTL vendor Diligent Technologies for what Israeli business site Globes says was $200 million. For IBM's spin on the deal, see the release here. If rumors about EMC and Quantum making a deal for deduplicating backup hardware are right, that leaves HP as the only major enterprise player without a deduplication solution.

This deal leaves us wondering how the vendors currently using Diligent's ProtecTier are going to be effected. As reported here, HDS has been reselling ProtecTier as part of a new series of packaged solutions. Sun has been reselling Diligent's software as a deduplicting alternative to its VTL using FalconStor's software and recently announced it will be adding FalconStor's SIR (Single Instance Repository)see here . Overland OEM's ProtecTier into its REO 9500D VTL.

IBM says the HDS deal will continue but hasn't commented on the others. I have a feeling Sun will quietly push SIR while downgrading ProtecTier.

Diligent started off as EMC's Israeli R&D group and EMC still holds an estimated 25%, so it will be getting around $50 million from the deal. It also reunites Diligent CEO Doran Kempel and Moshe Yanai, chairman of XIV, a grid storage specialist IBM bought earlier this year, and the primary designer of EMC's Symmetrix array.

Are there any more Israeli storage companies for IBM to buy?