EMC has acquired nLayers, a developer of software to discover and map applications across multiple servers.

EMC already had been working with nLayers on an OEM basis. The Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage giant announced the acquisition, terms of which weren’t disclosed, on Wednesday as part of its annual presentation to analysts.

San Jose, Calif.-based nLayers produces an appliance that automatically identifies, maps and models the relationships and interdependencies between applications, servers and devices, EMC said. nLayers had been providing the foundation for EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager software, an application EMC obtained when it acquired Smarts in December 2004.

EMC had recently announced it had entered the application discovery arena, Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci said during his analyst presentation. Application discovery and mapping is what many CIOs call the "Holy Grail," he noted.

"We can take an application and discover and correlate all the resources through all the domains that application is using," Tucci said. "We can model that, take automated action, and we can say how one application affects another application and how together they cross-correlate to affect resources in each of these domains. We got so impressed with what we were doing here we actually OEM'd some technology to do this. . . that we have just acquired the company we were working with."

nLayers has two primary products. nLayers InSight discovers and maps the complex relationships between applications and the technology infrastructure to provide an end-to-end dynamic model of the IT environment. nLayers InSight Managed Services is an application infrastructure discovery and optimization service based on nLayers InSight.