EMC today announced that it has acquired privately held, Bedford, Mass.-based Bus-Tech, Inc., a maker of virtual tape library (VTL) technology for mainframe environments. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed
Bus-Tech’s mainframe virtual tape library controllers use open systems disk storage to store and retrieve mainframe tape data. As a long time member of EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) Select Partner Program, Bus-Tech’s products have been used to connect EMC’s backup offerings to the mainframe for batch processing, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and data archiving applications.
A lot of the technical integration work between EMC and Bus-Tech’s respective products has already been done as Bus-Tech has been an EMC OEM partner since March of 2008. The most recent EMC-Bus-Tech collaboration resulted in a Deduplication Storage Expansion option for the EMC DLm960 Disk Library for Mainframe, which is based on EMC Data Domain DD880 deduplication storage system.
Bus-Tech’s technology also works with/is available for a range of EMC’s data protection products, including the Centera content addressed storage (CAS) system, Clariion, and Celerra NAS systems.
Bus-Tech’s biggest enterprise VTL, the Mainframe Data Library (MDL) MDL-6000, offers more than 1.5GBps performance and scales from 6 FICON channels and 768 tape devices to 12 FICON and 1,536 tape devices. The MDL-6000 includes a minimum of 3 redundant, independently operating emulation nodes (6 max); 2 redundant Access Control Point (ACPs); and the ability to attach large-scale storage arrays.
As a result of the acquisition, Bus-Tech is now part of EMC’s Backup Recovery Systems division, which is focused on disk-based backup and recovery.
EMC has acquired Bus-Tech with an eye toward the mainframe tape storage and media market, which IDC estimates will generate about $2.5 billion in revenue between now and 2014.
According to EMC, the acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the full 2010 fiscal year.
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