During a conference call late Monday afternoon, EMC chief executive Joe Tucci said that by acquiring Data Domain, his company could increase its deduplication portfolio and earn more than $1 billion in revenue next year from the $10 billion deduplication market.

"We didn't just wake up one day and say maybe this is a good thing to do. We've had our eye on Data Domain and obviously somebody moved before we did," Tucci said. "Even in stand-alone mode, you're a seeing projection of this company doing $480 million in revenue next year. We think we can grow it faster."

NetApp said it was not willing to discuss EMC's offer at this time.

Data de-duplication, or , involves the elimination of redundant data. Hash algorithms mark data blocks with unique numbers, and those numbers are compared so that duplicate pieces of data can be left out of the storage process.

EMC chief financial officer David Goulden said he expects the deal with Data Domain would close in the second half of this year.