Storage integrators surveyed recently for Everything Channel's 2008 State of Technology: Storage study picked out the companies they consider to be their most strategic partners. Here are the top 20 vendors that made the cut.

Headquarters: Hopkinton, Mass.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $3.7 billion (Q3, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Mitch Breen, senior vice president global channel strategy and sales

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: EMC is the largest independent (not affiliated with a server vendor) storage vendor, and is among the top manufacturers in a variety of hardware and software categories. The company has also proven to be a solid channel partner, and received the highest marks of any vendor in this year's VARBusiness Annual Report Card survey. The company has made solid strives into the small and midsize business channel with such acquisitions as Iomega and Dantz, where it works exclusively with channel partners. It is also one of the top channel partners in the midrange storage.

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $365.7 million (Q3, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Charles Leeming, vice president, OEM sales and global channels

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: More storage area networks are built using Fibre Channel switches and directors from Brocade than from any other vendor. The company is also moving to take advantage of the next connectivity solution, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $10.4 billion (Q4, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Keith Goodwin, senior vice president, worldwide channels

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: Cisco is using its strength in the IP networking market, where it is the number one vendor by far, to make it a major player in the storage networking market as well. In addition to becoming a major Fibre Channel vendor, the company is one of the leaders in the move to adopt FCoE.

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $10.2 billion (Q3, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Steve Dallman, vice president of the Sales and Marketing Group and general manager of the worldwide reseller channel organization

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: Intel makes a wide range of motherboards, enclosures, processors, and chips used in both name-brand and custom-built storage products. And its servers are still the basis for many a storage appliance. New from Intel in the last few months is a line of solid-state hard drives.

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $28.0 billion (Q3, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Adrian Jones, vice president and general manager, HP Solutions Partners Organization, Americas

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: HP has integrated a complete line of disk and tape storage appliances for nearly everyone from the smallest business to the largest enterprise. Its product line includes both in-house designed arrays and arrays from OEM partners such as Hitachi Data Systems. And while nearly all HP-branded business storage goes to HP server customers, those customers are likely to be served by channel partners.

Headquarters: Redmond, Wash.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $15.1 billion (Q1, FY2009)

Channel Chief: Allison Watson, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: Microsoft, with the release a couple years ago of its iSCSI target in its Windows operating system, lit the fire under what has since become the fastest-growing part of the storage market. Versions of Windows run many of the market's storage appliances, especially NAS appliances. And Microsoft, taking a page from VMware, is pushing hard into server virtualization, which is currently one of the top drivers for storage networks.

Headquarters: Armonk, NY

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $25.3 billion (Q3, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Richard Hume, general manager of global business partner

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: IBM has a strong server presence in the enterprise and midrange storage market, and that has meant great storage opportunities for its solution providers. Its traditional weakness in the small business side has been fixed by its OEM deal with NetApp under which it is selling nearly every NetApp product line through its VARs.

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $3.8 billion (Q4, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Tom Wagner, VP, Americas Region, Partner Sales Organization

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: While Sun server sales are falling, the company still has a huge installed base, especially in large companies such as financial firms, where business may be down but the amount of data collected is still growing. Sun has had relatively few strong in-house storage design, working instead with partner Hitachi Data Systems for its midrange and enterprise offerings. It acquired StorageTek a few years ago, which bolstered its storage business.

Headquarters: Taipei, Taiwan

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $764 million (Q3, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Keith Karlsen, Executive Vice President

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: D-Link has been a player for years in the SOHO storage market with its entry-level wired and wireless NAS appliances, and more recently has been making a splash in the channel with a line of low-cost iSCSI appliances.

Headquarters: Marlborough, Mass.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $342.7 million (Q1, FY2009)

Channel Chief: Alex Dobson, vice president and general manager for North America

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: 3Com, along with Cisco and other Ethernet switch vendors, has helped lay the network infrastructure with Gbit Ethernet and 10-Gbit Ethernet for high speed storage, both NAS and iSCSI.

Headquarters: San Jose

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $179.4 million (Q3, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Matthew Dargis, Senior Director of Sales, SMB North America

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: NetGear has become a big player in the SOHO and entry-level business NAS market by taking advantage of its networking offerings to bring out a line of complimentary storage products.

Headquarters: Tokyo

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $15.3 billion (Q1, FY2008) (all of Toshiba)

Channel Chief: Jerry Lumpkin, vice president of business channel sales in Toshiba America Information Systems' Digital Products Division

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: Toshiba is a top vendor to the mobile PC market. It is the volume leader in the 1.8-inch hard drive market, making it a popular choice for customers of lightweight mobile PCs. It also has one of the highest-density 2.5-inch hard drives.

Headquarters: Cupertino, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $1.7 billion (Q1, FY2009)

Channel Chief: Randy Cochran, vice president of North American channel sales (since Julie Parrish, former vice president of global sales, left in October)

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: The number-one independent provider of storage software, Symantec has a huge base of channel partners. The company has been in a state of flux recently with comments by top executives seen as channel-unfriendly, and the loss of its well-known channel chief, Julie Parrish. However, it continues to play a dominant role in the data backup and recovery thanks to its flagship applications Net Backup and Backup Exec.

Headquarters: Seoul, Korea

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $12.4 billion (Q2, FY2008) (all of Samsung)

Channel Chief: John Cerrato, vice president of global sales, Samsung Semiconductor

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: Samsung has been a player in the spinning hard drive market, where it is the fourth-largest vendor in terms of volume. However, it is betting heavily that the future of storage is solid-state. Samsung was one of the first of a new crop of solid-state drive makers to enter the market.

Headquarters: Costa Mesa, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $111.7 million (Q1, FY2009)

Channel Chief: Steve Marconi, vice president of worldwide channel sales

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: The company is a major player in the Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) market, and has recently introduced a new line of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) converged network adapters (CNAs), giving SAN customers and their solution providers a choice of connectivity solutions.

Headquarters: Scotts Valley, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $3.0 billion (Q1, FY2009)

Channel Chief: John Vossoughi, vice president of America's sales and marketing

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: As the world's largest hard drive vendor, and a major player in the external hard drive market, Seagate products go through the hands of just about every solution provider who deals with hardware of some sort in markets ranging from SOHO to enterprise.

Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $318.7 billion (Q1, FY2008) (all of Sony)

Channel Chief: Mike Woulfe, senior vice president of strategic sales planning

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: With consolidation in the tape industry, Sony's AIT and DDS formats, built in conjunction with partners like HP, have become the primary formats for the small business market. Despite the growth of disk-based backup products, tape has managed to survive and improve, especially for long-term archiving of data.

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $869 Million (Q1, FY2008)

Channel Chief: Julie Parrish, vice president of worldwide channel sales

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: NetApp is the top NAS player in the channel for midrange and enterprise customers, and also has a strong SAN offering through the channel. Its products are based on its proprietary ONTAP operating system which brings features like mirroring, snapshots, and deduplication to almost everything the company sells.

Headquarters: Milpitas, Calif.

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $31.7 billion (Q2, FY2009)

Channel Chief: Suresh Panikar, director of worldwide marketing

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: Adaptec is the largest maker of RAID controllers and host bus adapters (HBAs) for SATA and SAS drives, and as such plays a role with solution providers dealing with storage from the small business to the enterprise.

Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan

Revenue in Most Recent Quarter: $24.0 billion (Q1, FY2009) (all of Hitachi)

Channel Chief: Mike Walkey, senior vice president of global channels

Why It's a Strategic Storage Partner: HDS is a major player in the midrange and enterprise storage markets, both under its own brand name and through OEM and reseller deals with system vendors such as HP and Sun. It is also a major player in storage consolidation with a series of appliances that virtualizes multiple vendors' storage arrays behind a single management console.