In an attempt to bolster EMC's cloud computing business, the storage vendor has acquired assets from SourceLabs, a maker of support and management tools for Linux and open source software.

SourceLabs, led by former BEA executives, remains an independent company, EMC states.

"I can confirm that EMC has acquired some of the assets of SourceLabs and has hired a number of the company's employees," EMC spokesman Lesley Ogrodnick said in an e-mail Monday. "SourceLabs' acquired assets will operate within EMC's Cloud Infrastructure Business."

(View a slideshow on the hottest tech M&A deals of 2008.)

EMC's cloud storage strategy includes two distinct offerings, one for the consumer and small business market and another for large companies that need infrastructure for building and delivering Internet-based applications on a massive scale. (Compare storage products.)  

The second of these two cloud offerings is the focus of the SourceLabs acquisition, according to Ogrodnick. That would be Atmos, a software platform designed to manage petabytes of information across tens or hundreds of geographic locations. Atmos software, unveiled in November, can either be purchased by itself and run on x86 servers virtualized with VMware's hypervisor, or purchased in a bundle with EMC's "Hulk" hardware offering, which combines x86 servers with high-capacity, low-cost SATA drives.

One story about the SourceLabs acquisition speculates that EMC wants to use the company's assets to improve Decho, a consumer-focused division of EMC that offers an online backup tool for the management of personal information.

However, Ogrodnick says the acquisition is targeted at Atmos, not Decho.

One of EMC's goals with Atmos is to automate the management of huge storage volumes across wide distances, and provide auto-healing features to reduce the time administrators spend dealing with little bugs.

SourceLabs is a privately held company founded in 2004 by CEO Byron Sebastian, a former vice president at BEA. The company maintains a repository of 16 million potential bugs in Linux and Java and offers an automated diagnostics tool that identifies the reasons behind system crashes and other problems.