Dell to acquire Ocarina Networks to boost data management offerings

Dell today announced that it was acquiring Ocarina Networks, a storage optimization technology company, as part of its greater competitive push into the data management game. Terms of the deal were not released.

Dell, which has already beefed up its storage offerings with Equallogic, is entering a similar business as long-time partner EMC. EMC last year beat out NetApp to acquire data dedupe company Data Domain.

Particularly, Dell highlighted its interest in Ocarina's deduplication capability to complement the EqualLogic offering. Using tools like compression and deduplication, the company help customers reduce their storage needs by shrinking the redundant data and thus reduce costs and increase efficiency. In a statement, Brad Anderson, SVP of the Enterprise Product Group, said:

Ocarina provides an important component of our data management portfolio and our EqualLogic ecosystem to provide customers the best value for their IT investments. 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.

Dell said it plans to beef up sales and engineering after the sale is complete, which expected to be by the end of the month.