Mike Arrington has the news over at TechCrunch that Mozy has reportedly been acquired by EMC for $76-million. If true, that’s a pretty nice payout for a company that has raised relatively little venture capital.

I don’t use Mozy on a day-to-day basis, but I tried out an early beta and have used it off and on over the past year or so (I’ve also tried Carbonite.com and several other competitors), and I have to say I’ve been very impressed. It is easy to use and configure, and appears to be fairly light as far as system resources are concerned — everything one could want in a Web 2.0 storage app.

I interviewed CEO Josh Coates awhile back for a story I wrote for the Globe, and he impressed me as well — a very smart guy, who started Mozy’s parent company, Berkeley Systems, using technology developed while studying large-scale database management.

We talked about Google’s much-rumoured GDrive, as I recall, and he said a true “web-based hard drive” would be a difficult thing even for Google to do, let alone offer free of charge. But the rumours continue.