An agreement has been signed that will see NetApp acquire Canadian-based privately held company, Bycast.

Bycast is a developer of object-based storage software designed to manage petabyte-scale, globally distributed repositories of images, video, and records for enterprises and service providers.

NetApp said that the buyout will extend its position in unified storage by adding an object-based storage software offering.

“Bycast extends our unified storage strategy and enhances our solution for shared storage infrastructure by adding new capabilities for global data access and mobility,” said Manish Goel, Executive Vice President, Product Operations, NetApp.

“The addition of Bycast’s products enables NetApp to offer our enterprise customers and service provider partners a complementary solution that enables them to efficiently build and manage a very large-scale global repository of data central to many IT-as-a-service offerings.”

The acquisition is expected to be finalised in May 2010.

Last month NetApp said that its SAN business had doubled in two years and lists companies such as Brocade, Cisco, Microsoft, and VMware on its CV.