Data Storage used to constitute a fairly humdrum sector of IT. That's no longer the case: It's moved from being a critical but overlooked tool to something that can offer companies true competitive advantage, thanks mainly to technological advances that are poised to change the industry.

eWeek identified 10 companies providing disruptive storage technlogies - and the technologies, companies and sectores being disrupted - and provides a framework for how to put them in context for your organization.

Disrupter: RPost, United States
Disrupted: Conventional email archiving companies.

New legislation and court rulings hold that electronic messages are given the same legal status as paper documents. However, if the other side is not willing to stipulate that they received your e-mail and that it said what you say it did, your evidence admissibility and defense is in question—and you have a major legal problem.
Registered email provides the sender with verifiable proof that the message was sent and legally delivered for ANY Internet address. The sender gets a receipt via e-mail proving content, times, and legal delivery.
RPost Registered E-mail minimizes denial of e-mail receipt or content received, minimizes shirking of responsibility, and lets users better understand what information has actually been transmitted, to whom, and when. RPost Registered E-mail provides legal and verifiable proof and protection for the sender of any Registered E-mail sent to any recipient anywhere in the world—regardless of what system or software the recipient uses, regardless of their settings, and without requiring them to respond in any way. The cost: About $1 per day per user.

Other disruptive storage techonolgies selected:

• Seanodes and RevStor: Using existing server space for storage.
• Xsigo Systems: First to do I/O hardware virtualization.
• Gear6: Cache and carry.
• Pillar Data Systems: Commodity hardware, software efficiency like no other.
• Moonwalk: No middleware needed in node agent-oriented software.
• Panasas: Opens up the I/O freeway with parallel file system.
• Caringo: The Porsche of read/write functions.
• CopperEye: Mixes high-speed indexing with commodity hardware to find the needle in the haystack.