EMC Wednesday announced that it has agreed to acquire Rainfinity in a deal valued at less than $100 million.

Rainfinity makes software that virtualizes network-attached storage (NAS) devices and file systems. The growth of unstructured file-based information stored on these devices along with the difficulty of managing it is the impetus for EMC’s acquisition.

"With the addition of Rainfinity, 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," Howard Elias, EMC executive vice president of corporate marketing and the Office of Technology, said in a statement.

Rainfinity’s RainStorage combines file virtualization with specific modules centered around information lifecycle management, capacity and performance utilization. It allows IT administrators to identify, analyze and resolve performance, capacity and usage bottlenecks. The software works across Windows Common Internet File System and the Unix/Linux Network File System.

“This is a useful acquisition for EMC, and it is clearly intended to bolster its technology base,” says Graham Titterington of Ovum Research. “EMC has been seeing very rapid growth in its NAS business since it started to address it energetically.”

EMC’s acquisition of Rainfinity will also bring it into closer competition with NAS file vendor Network Appliance. Network Appliance uses software from Houston's NuView presently to virtualize NAS resources. It is working to integrate its acquisition of Spinnaker Networks, a NAS virtualization vendor, into its products.

The deal is expected to close this month.

EMC also confirmed that it has agreed to buy the assets of intelligent storage switch vendor Maranti Networks. While EMC claims it will not get into the Fibre Channel switch business, it is expected to fold Maranti’s technology into its Invista virtualization appliance.