Dell Acquires Dedupe Specialist Ocarina Networks

Dell, continuing to bring innovative young companies into its realm, revealed late on July 19 that it acquiring San Jose, Calif.-based storage deduplication software provider Ocarina Networks. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Ocarina brings second-generation deduplication capability to bundle inside Dell’s EqualLogic storage product line, which is aimed primarily at unstructured data in midrange enterprise-size data centers.
Ocarina’s open-standards software includes compression. The hybrid application is designed to snap easily into existing storage systems to enable users to store the same amount of data on significantly fewer disks.
The company said its Ocarina Optimizers have shrunk more than 1 billion files in tests with early support customers. Ocarina’s three-step software line-called Extract, Correlate and Optimize-can deduplicate file types that include e-mail, photos, video, Microsoft Office files and industry-specific file types for energy, media, medicine and genomics applications.
Dell earlier this month bought data center automation specialist Scalent Systems, and in February it acquired application virtualization provider KACE.
Ocarina Networks was founded in 2007. Dell said it expects to complete the acquisition by the end of the month. After closing, Dell said it plans to maintain and invest in additional engineering and sales capability. There are no plans to move the current operations.
Ocarina was featured this past week in an eWEEK slideshow on “17 Promising Storage Companies Flying Under the Radar.” Suddenly, Ocarina isn’t under anybody’s radar anymore.