EMC to Buy Isilon Systems

Another acquisition for EMC. The data storage technology supplier, which over the past five years has spent some $7 billion buying other companies, is reaching for its wallet once again. This morning, EMC announced plans to purchase Isilon Systems. Price: $33.85 a share in cash, or roughly $2.25 billion.

For EMC, the acquisition of Isilon gives it a stake in the network-attached storage space, a fast-growing market for “big data” storage (think movie studio catalogs and gene sequencing information) currently dominated by the likes of NetApp and the site of some other big acquisitions this year–Hewlett-Packard’s purchase of 3Par for $2.4 billion, for example. “The unmistakable waves of cloud computing and ‘big data’ are upon us,” EMC CEO Joe Tucci said in a statement. “Customers are looking for new ways to store, protect, secure and add intelligence to the vast amounts of information they will accumulate over the next decade.”