EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rainfinity. Based in San Jose, California, privately held Rainfinity is a leading provider of virtualization solutions for heterogeneous networked attached storage (NAS) and file system environments. The acquisition, valued at less than $100 million, is expected to be completed by the end of August.

Howard Elias, EMC Executive Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Office of Technology, said, “The rapid growth of unstructured file-based information, along with the rising complexity of its management, have customers demanding the same high utilization rates in their NAS and file system environments that they have come to expect from SANs. Rainfinity is the industry’s first standards-based solution available today that virtualizes Windows, Unix and Linux file systems, giving customers improved total cost of ownership across all of their heterogeneous NAS and file server platforms.

“With the addition of Rainfinity,” Elias continued, “EMC is extending the benefits of virtualization to EMC and non-EMC NAS environments to enable more comprehensive information lifecycle management solutions, better resource management and overall operational improvement.”

Rainfinity’s Network File Virtualization technology provides for full read/write access to Windows, Linux and Unix-based files during system migrations, regardless of where the data resides and with no threat of data loss. Customers leverage Rainfinity’s heterogeneous NAS and file server virtualization to achieve a broad set of benefits including increased networked storage utilization, non-disruptive upgrades, optimized performance and accelerated networked storage consolidation.

John Schroeder, CEO of Rainfinity said, “We are thrilled to be joining the industry leader in ILM and networked storage and are excited by what the combination will mean to our customers and to the future of NAS and file server management. We’ve spent years developing the unique stateless architecture that is at the core of our file virtualization technology. It ensures scalability, data integrity and ease of deployment for extremely large and complex network file environments.”

EMC has brought together the most comprehensive portfolio of solutions and related software, platforms and services to help customers drive the highest levels of value from ILM. In the past six months EMC has introduced high-end NAS solutions that set a new standard for performance and availability. According to IDC, EMC is the worldwide revenue leader in networked storage systems and storage software, and EMC is #1 in network attached storage (NAS) revenue, having captured 37.9% revenue share in the first quarter of 2005. [a]