SolarWinds is continuing its acquisitions streak with the $42m (cash and stock) purchase of storage and virtualization resource management provider Tek-Tools.  The acquisition will help fill a storage monitoring gap in their Orion network management solution.

Storage visibility and management are getting trickier as IT environments struggle to get a handle on both physical storage assets and now virtual storage allocations.

SolarWinds’ chief product strategist, Kenny Van Zant, expanded on the growing complexity in storage deployments:

“Today’s data centers include application servers, virtualization layers and storage all dependent on an ‘always available’ network, and the ongoing adoption of virtualization and the associated storage needs continue to drive the demand for and importance of networked storage”

Tek-Tools’ primary product offering, Profiler Suite, will now be available from SolarWinds’ direct.  It’s likely that the Profiler suite will continue to be available in its current state while SolarWinds integrates the technology into the Orion package.

Dallas, TX-based Tek-Tools has over 65 employees.

Read the full purchase announcement here