In my humble opinion, 2011 was the year for storage inside the virtualization space with a lot of new storage related technologies presented at VMworld 2011. There were different technologies ranging from Tier 1 SSD storage in a box that can plug right into VMware vSphere as its own datastore, to all the software storage venders that are now virtualizing their Storage Processers. Yes, for me, 2011 was the year for storage in virtualization.