EMC has acquired FastScale Technology, a vendor of software for data centers, in an effort to focus on supporting private cloud infrastructures, the company announced Monday.

With the acquisition, EMC will focus on increasing the performance and scalability of private clouds, the company said.

The acquisition of FastScale extends EMC's Ionix product packages for automating IT management across storage, computing, network and virtualization resources.

The acquisition will help EMC customers move from physical data centers to virtualized data centers or private clouds, the company said.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal for FastScale, a privately held vendor based in Santa Clara, California.

FastScale's technology is focused on simplifying application and server stack management and easing deployment of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures.

Using FastScale technology, companies can run data centers with up to three times more virtual machines without degrading performance, EMC said.

Also on Monday, EMC announced an expanded business and technology partnership with VMware.

EMC will be an authorized reseller of VMware vCenter AppSpeed, which can allow IT departments to measure the performance of applications running in VMware vSphere 4 virtual environments and pinpoint the cause of any performance problems, EMC said.

FastScale's flagship product -- FastScale Composer Suite -- is an automated platform for building, optimizing, managing and deploying application environments in physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures.

The product allows customers to streamline software stacks automatically and dynamically deploy logical servers to physical, virtual or cloud within minutes, EMC said.