If the storage industry is anything, it's dynamic. But some things never change: the need for more storage capacity and the endless search for better, less tedious ways to protect data.

Storage magazine's editors have reviewed technology developments, product introductions and storage standards over this past year to identify those we expect will become the hot storage technologies in 2007. Some of these technologies, like iSCSI SANs and virtualization, have appeared in these pages for years. This coming year, however, both appear poised to cross a major threshold. Other selections, like hardware-based tape encryption, are based on new technologies that attempt to address a single issue: stemming the tide of identify theft and misappropriation of corporate secrets resulting from lost data tapes.