Storage giant EMC announced plans Wednesday in the US to acquire Avamar Technologies in a US$165 million cash deal, furthering EMC's efforts in the data retrieval and retention arena.
Avamar, a privately held company based in California, will be integrated into EMC's storage product operations. The seven-year-old company develops software designed to remove redundancies in data before it is backed up to disk.
"The limitations of tape-based backup have inspired the creation of new technology, such as data de-duplication, to significantly alter the cost and efficiency equation for disk-based backup," said Mark Sorenson, EMC senior VP of information management software, in a statement.
Avamar's technology will back up data once and then identify any redundant pieces of information at the source where it is created. As a result, the technology is designed to only back up that piece of altered information, rather than the entire document, for example.
EMC's pending acquisition of Avamar is the latest for the storage company, which announced plans in September to acquire IT security company Network Intelligence for US$175 million. And earlier this year, EMC announced its mega-merger plans to acquire RSA Security for US$2.1 billion.
