EMC is dipping into its war chest yet again, with the storage giant announcing last week it will buy data protection vendor Kashya for US$153million.

The deal is one of 20 acquisitions that EMC has made in recent years, spending US$4.5 billion in the process.

At EMC’s annual conference in Boston last month, CEO Joe Tucci had promised the firm would make acquisitions that complemented its technology roadmap (see IT Weekly 6-12 May 2006).

By buying Kashya, EMC gains access to key replication software technology that will be immediately integrated into the vendor’s software group.

EMC software group president Dave DeWalt said the move expanded the company’s market and gave it technology to extend its share of the information infrastructure markets.

“By combining Kashya’s rich portfolio of heterogeneous
replication software with our industry leading virtualisation and continuous data protection technologies, EMC is enhancing the market’s broadest set of capabilities for virtualising and safeguarding the world’s information,” explained DeWalt.

The purchase is just the latest in a long line of acquisitions EMC has made to bolster its portfolio of storage software.

In late 2003 the vendor boug- ht content management software developer Documentum for US$1.7 billion and in January 2004 it spent US$635 million on virtualisation software provider VMWare. More recently, in May last year, EMC unveiled InVista as part of its software portfolio.

The purchase of the high-performance networked storage
virtualisation solution is seen as a key driver for EMC’s information lifecycle management (ILM) approach. EMC said Kashya’s disaster recovery and ‘snap’ replication technology would augment its solution InVista, while its continuous data protection (CDP) technology would be used in future releases of EMC’s RecoverPoint software.