Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

Dell (News - Alert) announced this week that it has signed an agreement to acquire Ocarina Networks, a provider of storage optimization technology including compression and deduplication. Ocarina’s technology is said to help customers reduce data management costs and streamline operations.

Officials with Dell said Ocarina provides an important component of its data management portfolio and enhances the Texas-based company’s ability to provide customers the best value for their IT investments.

“Content-aware deduplication allows us to provide a true global approach to deduplication across the datacenter and has a tremendous ripple effect of cost savings that frees up budgets for strategic investments,” said Brad Anderson, Dell senior vice president, Enterprise Product Group.

Ocarina’s content-aware optimization technology allows customers to “dramatically” reduce storage space requirements and the amount of redundant data, Dell officials said.

Unstructured data from the Internet, e-mail and images continues to proliferate in customer environments as retention requirements increase. Therefore, optimizing data across the IT environment drives reductions in costs associated with disk capacity, network bandwidth, power and cooling, data center space and management.

Company officials said that Dell’s intent is to drive increased efficiency with a goal of radically reducing data management costs. These savings can help Dell customers make room in their budgets for other strategic investments to help their business succeed.

Prior to its annual meeting for securities analysts last month, Dell said it expects revenue growth for the remainder of the year – fueled by the replacement of older computers among businesses and governmental organizations, TMCnet reported.

Dell said it expects revenue for Fiscal 2011 will increase 14 to 19 percent over Fiscal 2010. Dell also said it expects that operating income will increase by 18 to 23 percent over Fiscal 2010 and cash flow from operations will be greater than net income for the current year.