Mergers & Acquisitions on Ulitzer

Dell confirmed that it’s trying to buy the gone-bust Israeli clustered NAS start-up Exanet after Israel’s Globes news site said Monday that the deal was in the bag.

There is also speculation that Dell might start selling EMC’s recently acquired Data Domain deduplication widgetry, the stuff it snatched away from NetApp last year. Dell has sold EMC’s Clariion arrays for years.

In an e-mailed statement the company said, “Dell has submitted an offer to purchase Exanet assets, primarily patents and other IP, with court approval through a Chapter 7 liquidation in Israel. The transaction has not yet been approved by the Israel court, so we won’t speculate on its completion or timing.”

Dell is reportedly trying to get the joint on the cheap, supposedly offering only $12 million for a company whose four investors kicked in $70 million over the last 10 years.

The acquisition is supposed to give Dell its first R&D center in Israel.

Exanet also has offices in the US, the UK, Germany, France and Japan. It remains to seen what Dell would do with them and the widgetry and what impact it might have on its other relationships.

Exanet’s key Linux-based ExaStore Clustered NAS is a scalable, high-performance, petabytes-storing solution with a clustered distributed file system. Administrators can expand capacity and performance as needed, when needed, without affecting applications or users.

It supports virtual storage provisioning and consists of two building blocks: an integrated, high-performance EX1500 server pre-installed with the ExaStore clustered distributed storage operating system that can front the company’s own DX series 4Gb/s Fibre Channel disk storage or any of a long list of all the usual storage systems that Exanet certifies.

Dell’s e-mail said that “ExaStore is only one of Exanet’s product lines so this purchase would potentially be broader in scope.”

Exanet has technical partnership with folks like 3PAR, Red Hat, Intel, EMC, Hitachi and IBM.