Capping off a season packed with storage news, Sun Microsystems this morning declared its intentions to purchase StorageTek for $4.1 billion. The companies, of course, claim that Sun’s storage hardware, and its platform for virtualization and data services are a natural fit for StorageTek’s line of data protection and intelligent archive products including its Storage Resource management software and virtual tape systems, as the IDG News Service reported. The story, Sun to acquire StorageTek for $4.1 billion, described the purchase: The acquisition is part of Sun’s strategy to meet customers’ needs to rationalize their datacenter purchases, helping them “free up time and dollars to focus on compliance, architectural integration, security and … the bottom line,” the company said in a statement. The products and services currently offered by Sun and StorageTek complement each other and will form one of the most comprehensive storage and data management portfolios in the industry, the statement said. Other storage vendors have been busy this spring as well. On Monday, Brocade announced several new products designed to make SANs smarter. As the story written by my colleague Bob Francis points out, Brocade is hardly the only vendor doing this. Late last week, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems extended an existing interoperability agreement the companies had regarding their storage systems. The deal calls for Hitachi’s systems to support Big Blue’s mirroring and replication software, and for the companies to collaborate on interoperability testing between Hitachi’s storage system and IBM’s zSeries mainframes. In the middle of May, HP and EMC held dueling user shows at which HP made what executives referred to as the largest expansion of its StorageWorks line in company history. EMC also pushed its virtualization strategy forward, and NetApp added to its midrange roster.