EMC, in Hopkinton, Mass., will acquire the privately held Irvine, Calif.-based company for US$165 million in cash. The deal is expected to close within 30 days and all 100 Avamar employees are expected to remain. Avamar will be integrated into EMC's Storage Product Operations group along with EMC's NetWorker backup and recovery software.

Data deduplication is a way to reduce the amount of backup data by eliminating copies and then only backing up the remaining data once -- no matter how many times it's reproduced. The technology can reduce the amount of data being stored by 99 percent and make backing up to disk cheaper than backing up to tape, said Mark Lewis, EMC's executive vice president and chief development officer.

Avamar's Axiom disk backup and recovery product will continue to be sold as a stand-alone product, as will EMC's NetWorker. Avamar's deduplication technology could be integrated over time into EMC products such as the recently , Lewis said.

Currently, the data deduplication market consists of about a half-dozen smaller vendors, including Avamar, Data Domain Inc., Diligent Technologies Corp. and Exagrid Systems Inc. Other vendors, including Advanced Digital Information Corp., Falconstor Software Inc. and Sepaton Inc., have announced plans to ship such products.

However, data deduplication has shown signs of being the next new technology to be subsumed by large storage vendors. The smaller companies have been signing partnership agreements with larger firms, which typically presages a round of agreements and acquisitions as the smaller vendors pair off with the larger ones.