EMC to acquire data management company

Storage giant EMC announced plans Wednesday to acquire Avamar Technologies in a $165 million cash deal, furthering EMC's efforts in the data retrieval and retention arena.

Avamar, a privately held company based in Irvine, Calif., will be integrated into EMC's storage product operations. The 7-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 vice president of information management software, in a statement. "Avamar is acknowledged as the industry's best at helping customers transcend the shortcomings of traditional tape-based methods."

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 $175 million. And earlier this year, EMC announced its mega-merger plans to acquire RSA Security for $2.1 billion.