“We will be a consolidator in this industry.” So declared Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy in announcing, with his customary (if not always warranted) brio, that his firm will cough up $4.1 billion – half its cash reserve – to buy StorageTek. Sun’s move follows similar thrusts into the storage market by archrivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard. All three companies are trying to position themselves as IT utilities, and that requires an ability to weave together storage, processing and software in order to provide an efficient, tightly integrated IT infrastructure. The immediate goal, as McNealy put it, is to help companies “rationalize” their data centers. The longer term goal is to render those privately owned data centers obsolete. As the battle over control of the corporate IT infrastructure heats up, some of the fiercest fighting will no doubt take place in the field of data storage.