Looking to help customers manage an ever-increasing number of storage devices, EMC last week announced that it would acquire Rainfinity in a deal valued at "less than $100 million."

Rainfinity makes software that virtualizes and then manages the file resources stored on network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Rainfinity's RainStorage combines file virtualization with specific modules focusing on information life-cycle management (ILM), capacity and performance utilization. The product allows IT administrators to identify, analyze and resolve performance, capacity and usage bottlenecks, and it works across Microsoft's Common Internet File System and the Unix/"Linux Network File Systems.

EMC says that as the use of NAS systems grow in midsize and larger companies, managing them and controlling the resources on them become more difficult. Moving and migrating data among systems based on its value to the business also is an often-complex manual activity.

"With the addition of Rainfinity, EMC is extending the benefits of virtualization to EMC and non-EMC NAS environments to enable more comprehensive information life-cycle management solutions, better resource management and overall operational improvement," says Howard Elias, EMC executive vice president of corporate marketing and the office of technology, in a statement.

Analysts have applauded the move.

"If EMC is serious about enterprise-wide ILM, rather than just point-product deployments, they needed a technology that could migrate data between storage tiers easily," says Stephanie Balaouras, senior analyst with The Yankee Group. "Rainfinity's RainStorage is an enterprise-wide solution that plays to core EMC NAS customers. This is for a company that has a proliferation of NAS filers and gateways with significant capacity requirements."

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

EMC's march into NAS started almost 10 years ago, when the company announced its first NAS system, the EMC Celerra. Since then, EMC has broadened its NAS line with the introduction of a NAS gateway, which allows users to view storage-area network data from the network, NAS-based data migration software and a low-end Windows Storage Server, the EMC NetWin.