After lying low for a while on big-ticket acquisitions, the world's largest data storage company, EMC Corporation, yesterday unveiled plans to buy Isilon Systems Inc, a network attached storage systems company, for $2.25 billion in cash.

The proposed acquisition by EMC comes after it fought a nearly two-month bitter battle in July last year with arch rival rival NetApp to acquire Santa Clara-based Data Domain for $2.1 billion. (See: EMC wins $2.1-billion bidding war for Data Domain)

''The unmistakable waves of cloud computing and 'Big Data' are upon us and customers are looking for new ways to store, protect, secure and add intelligence to the vast amounts of information they will accumulate over the next decade," says Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC.

"EMC, in combination with Isilon, sits at the intersection of these trends with leading products, solutions and services to help customers get the absolute most out of what cloud computing has to offer,'' he adds.

Seattle, Washington-based Isilon Systems designs and sells clustered storage systems and software for digital content and other unstructured data.

Isilon is known as the leader in the fast-growing ''Scale-out NAS'' segment, which market research firm IDC projects will grow on average approximately 36 per cent annually reaching an estimated $6 billion dollars in 2014.

Its products are used to store and manage data filesets across various industries including media & entertainment, government, IC design, oil & gas, manufacturing, life sciences, Internet/Web 2.0, and content delivery providers.

Isilon received venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital. Isilon's customers include NBC Universal, Kelman Technologies and Kodak, among others.

Together, EMC's Atmos and Isilon's solutions will offer customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing ''Big Data.''

Big Data is a term used to describe the massive amount of data produced by a new generation of applications in markets such as life sciences (e.g. gene sequencing), media and entertainment (e.g. online streaming), and oil and gas (e.g. seismic interpretation) to name a few, said EMC in a statement.

EMC expects the combined revenue from Isilon and EMC Atmos to reach $1 billion run-rate during second half of 2012.

Under terms of the deal, Hopkinton-Massachusetts-based Fortune 500 company, EMC will pay $33.85 per share in cash in exchange for each share of Isilon for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $2.25 billion, net of Isilon's existing cash balance.

''Our excitement about the opportunity to become part EMC's world-class team cannot be overstated," says Sujal Patel, CEO of Isilon. "EMC's track record of successfully acquiring, integrating and growing leading companies and the complementary nature of our technologies are undeniable. Together, Isilon and EMC are ideally positioned to take our company to the next level and accelerate Isilon's growth and technology adoption by customers around the world.''

Founded in 1979, EMC has grown through acquisitions and had made over 50 since 1993. It has spent around $7 billion since 2005 in acquiring over 30 companies.

Last week, it acquired privately held Bedford, Massachusetts-based Bus-Tech, a provider of VTL (Virtual Tape Library) solutions that utilize open systems disk storage to store and retrieve mainframe tape data.

For 2009, EMC reported revenues of $14 billion and net income of $1.1 billion.