EMC Corp. on Wednesday said it plans to acquire Rainfinity, a maker of network file virtualization software. Its core product, RainStorage, is used to move data between network-attached storage devices and archival storage as part of an information-lifecycle management strategy. It also seamlessly moves data within heterogeneous NAS environments during upgrades, such as between EMC's Celerra and NetApp devices.

EMC said it's paying less than $100 million for privately held Rainfinity, and the deal is expected to close by the end of the month.

The acquisition will help EMC "simplify the management and usability of very complex NAS environments," says Tony Asaro, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

EMC said the acquisition would provide customers with increased networked storage utilization, nondisruptive upgrades, optimized performance, and accelerated networked storage consolidation. Network file virtualization lets NAS devices and file systems work together. Products from Rainfinity and other vendors such as Acopia Networks, NeoPath Networks, and NuView offer a way to rein in costs associated with managing large file systems spanning multiple operating systems and storage devices.

Rainfinity supports both of the de facto global namespace standards: DFS (for Windows environments) and Automount (for Unix and Linux environments). A global namespace is a convention that allows applications to access files without having to know their physical location.