EMC offers sneak peek of EMC World 2009

EMC is set to add new data deduplication capabilities and virtualisation functionalities to its storage portfolio.

The announcements are scheduled to take place at the firm’s annual US customer and partner event, EMC World, taking place in Orlando from 18 May.

The theme of this year’s event, given the current economic climate, is how IT cut down storage costs, EMC said.

“Budgets are tight and information continues to grow by 50 per cent and so the focus is on IT managers and how they can make efficiencies,” said EMC spokesman, Rick Lacroix.

Lacroix said customers attending should expect practical advice on the best way to deploy storage infrastructure, with a particular focus on EMC’s data deduplication technologies and virtualisation strategies.

In February, EMC added data deduplication capabilities used in EMC’s Avamar and RecoverPoint backup and recovery solutions to its Celerra NAS range in order to compress inactive files. The firm said similar functionality would be extended across its other storage platforms in May.

Lacroix said the benefits of on-demand storage models would be another “hot area” of discussion at the event. This follows EMC’s release in April of EMC Symmetrix V-Max System, the first storage system based on the company’s new Virtual Matrix Architecture that supports virtual data centres.

“The data centre gives customers the flexibility to meet growing requirements,” Lacroix said.

Flash technology was a big topic at EMC World in 2008 with EMC predicting that enterprise flash storage drives would cost as little as fibre channel alternatives by 2010.

Lacroix said Flash technology had fallen by 75 per cent since that prediction and customers could expect more announcements on Flash at EMC World 2009.

“Typically customers are storage tiering - deploying Flash with traditional drives to get the highest performance,” said Lacroix.

Also at event, EMC’s Security Division will give an insider view of the “fraudster’s enterprise”, with help from RSA’s Anti-Fraud Command Centre in Israel, while Howard Elias, EMC Global Services and Resource Management Software Group president will lead a panel of EMC and VMware experts as they take questions and discuss cloud computing.