Dell buys storage optimization company

Dell has signed an agreement to acquire a company that provides storage optimization technology. Ocarina Networks' content-aware technology lets customers reduce storage space requirements and the amount of redundant data, reducing data management costs and streamlining operations.

Unstructured data from the Internet, email, and images continues to proliferate in customer environments as retention requirements increase. Optimizing data across the IT environment drives substantial reductions in costs associated with disk capacity, network bandwidth, power and cooling, datacenter space and management.

Brad Anderson, senior VP of the enterprise product group at Dell, noted that "Ocarina provides an important component of our data management portfolio and our ability to provide customers the best value for their IT investments." He added that "Content-aware deduplication allows us to provide a true global approach to deduplication across the datacenter and has a tremendous ripple effect of cost savings that frees up budgets for strategic investments."

Murli Thirumale, CEO, Ocarina Networks, explained that "This is a great opportunity for the Ocarina technology, and for Ocarina customers and partners. Combining Ocarina's capability with Dell's leading storage portfolio, we plan to move the Ocarina solution well beyond what you've seen with other deduplication offerings to include 'end-to-end' optimization. This brings deduplication to not only primary storage, but also to key storage workflows including backup, replication, migration and tiering."

Subject to customary closing conditions, Dell expects to complete the acquisition by the end of the month. After closing, Dell plans to maintain and invest in additional engineering and sales capability. There are no plans to move the current operations. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.