Q2 M&A dropped to a total of 5 transaction from 9 in Q1 but total consideration rose significantly to $659M, driven by Western Digital’s acquisition of STEC for $340M.  While the STEC deal was certainly not a “big surprise”, it does bring further consolidation to the SSD space and may be a precursor to projected consolidation in the solid state systems space. Other notable transactions include EMC’s purchase of ScaleIO for an estimated $200M and Fusion-io purchase of NexGen Storage for $119M.  ScaleIO brings EMC a new software platform for scale-out SAN while NexGen brings Fusion-io further into the systems business.   Total M&A for the first half totaled 14 deals with roughly $1B in consideration, which is on-track with our forecast of $2B for all of 2013.  Storage related venture funding keeps up solid momentum with $135.5M across 14 rounds with an average of $11.3M per round.  Smaller and later rounds of funding led the quarter with the exceptions being Panzura, Atlantis and PernixData securing larger rounds of $25M, $20M, and $20M respectively.  We also had a first round of funding for Reduxio, a provider of hybrid SSD solutions.  Our venture forecast of $700M for 2013 is looking good with $368M invested in the first half of 2013 through 28 rounds of funding.