The large IT vendor Dell announced it has made an agreement to acquire a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of storage optimization technology Ocarina Networks. Ocarina's technology includes compression and deduplication.

Ocarina's "content-aware" deduplication technology will now be included with Dell's storage systems. According to the buyer, data optimization across the IT environment can reduce costs associated with disk capacity, network bandwidth, power and cooling, data center space and management.

"Ocarina provides an important component of our data management portfolio and our ability to provide customers the best value for their IT investments," Brad Anderson, SVP of Dell's Enterprise Product Group, said in a statement."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."

Ocarina CEO Murli Thirumale said the company's aim is to take a next step from just primary storage deduplication to "end-to-end" optimization, which takes deduplication beyond primary storage and into other storage workflows, including back-up, replication, migration and tiering.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.