Dell, on one of its still rare acquisition outings, bought Ocarina Networks, a storage optimization start-up launched three years ago by a couple of guys from Citrix whose patented hardware and software technology, including compression and deduplication, reduces the data footprint and the cost of disk capacity, network bandwidth, power and cooling, data center space and management.

It's positioned as a solution for the rising heaps of unstructured data coming from the Internet, e-mail and images while retention requirements increase.

Dell said it would complement its own EqualLogic storage widgetry. Dell storage supplier EMC staged a fight with NetApp last year to buy deduplication house Data Domain and won. It's unclear whether Dell's move will unsettle anything. It should make Dell more competitive with NetApp.

No price was mentioned. Ocarina got $32 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital and JAFCO Ventures.

Ocarina customers include Kodak, Photobucket and Photoways Group, Europe's largest photo-sharing site. Photobucket says that Ocarina reduces its storage footprint "by over 40% over and above the existing JPEG compression." It's also got - or had - supply relationships with HP and HDS. HP now has its own deduplication widgetry called StoreOnce.

Dell should close on the deal by the end of the month and plans to invest in additional engineering and sales capability.

Ocarina CEO Murli Thirumale said in a statement that "we plan to move the Ocarina solution well beyond what you've seen with other deduplication offerings to include end-to-end optimization. This brings deduplication to not only primary storage, but also to key storage workflows including backup, replication, migration and tiering."

The start-up will stay in San Jose.