EMC Acquires Rainfinity, MarantiEMC Acquires Rainfinity, Maranti

EMC's got its checkbook out again and is adding to its network attached storage assets and to its switching line.

The vendor said Wednesday it is acquiring Rainfinity, a privately held NAS vendor, in a deal valued at less than $100 million. Rainfinity appliances improve storage utilization in Linux, Unix and Windows environments. Its Network File Virtualization technology provides for full read/write access during system migrations, regardless of where the data resides.

The deal is expected to close by the end of this month.

In a separate transaction, EMC acquired the assets—personnel and intellectual property--of Maranti Networks, a startup focused on intelligent switching and virtualization. Estimated value of that deal was about $5 million.

Both deals are good complements for EMC, according to independent consultant Randy Kerns. What Rainfinity gives EMC is a global namespace solution for larger enterprises that want to consolidate multiple file servers under a single identity. "And that's a big deal since it makes NAS a lot more applicable to the large enterprise environment," he said. "It enables global data movement and tracks very well with the information lifecycle management strategy."

The Maranti assets will also help EMC fill gaps in its Invista virtualization storage switch, introduced earlier this year. Maranti's software for remote replication and point-in-time copying was missing from Invista, so the deal will help EMC get those capabilities to market quicker, according to Kerns.