NetApp expects to pay $480 million in an all-cash deal for Engenio, which is a subsidiary of LSI Corp.

NetApp CEO Tom Georgens said in a conference call that Engenio gives NetApp a foothold in emerging and fast-growing market segments such as video, including full-motion video capture and digital video surveillance. It also serves high-performance computing applications, such as genomics sequencing and scientific research.

Emphasizing little overlap with the product portfolio, Georgens said the video processing and high-performance computing markets are ones that NetApp cannot currently serve with its Fabric-Attached Storage line of products and Data ONTAP operating system.

NetApp's current line of storage arrays are focused on capturing and serving up data to traditional enterprise server applications, such as transactional databases, financial and ERP systems, as well as unstructured data such as e-mail.

"We're not looking for an asset to be a holding company. It has to have some relation to our core business. It needs to be something our existing channels can sell or will enable us to sell more of our core products into," Georgens said. "I think this adds new capabilities to our company without duplicating functionality."