In the first of what I'm sure will be many acquisitions in the storage business this year, Imation announced Wednesday that it is acquiring disk array vendor Nexsan for $120 million in cash and stock. This acquisition continues Imation's transition from a media vendor to a general-purpose storage vendor for the small and midsize business (SMB), and now small and midsize enterprise (SME), market -- and leaves XIO as the last of the previous generation of storage startups to remain independent.

Nexsan was one of the first vendors to bring low-cost ATA, and later SATA, drives into the data center with its ATABoy, SATABoy and SATABeast arrays. Nexsan has cultivated a reputation for efficient and reliable, if not very exciting, bulk storage systems for archives, backups and similar non-OLTP applications. Over the past two years or so, Nexsan has greatly enhanced the value its storage systems beyond simple bulk storage, so the current E-Series arrays and NST5000 unified storage systems have more than the usual set of features, including support for hybrid SSD/HDD configurations.