Last month’s EMC user conference in Las Vegas saw the launch of several new products for the storage market, while the firm said it would extend virtual provisioning across its entire backup and recovery portfolio. It also plans to unveil a new datacentre in Dublin, which it expects will bring benefits for UK customers.

During the event, EMC announced virtual provisioning for its network storage product Clariion. Dave Donatelli, president of the firm’s storage division, said EMC plans to bring more and more virtual provisioning capabilities into the file environment.

Donatelli said this feature will soon be extended across EMC’s backup and recovery portfolio, and that de-duplication capabilities will also be added to the firm’s storage offerings. He also hinted that the Networker backup and recovery software may be made available as a hosted service.

Virtual provisioning allows customers to expand storage capacity more easily than the thin provisioning alternative, according to EMC, because it increases storage capacity automatically as required, preventing the over-allocation of storage capacity as well as reducing costs.

So far, EMC has added virtual provisioning to its Celerra and Symmetrix offerings, and will at some point introduce it to its Connectrix range. However, the Centera product family will not make use of the technology because it is an object-based archive system, not file-based.

The company also used its Las Vegas event to detail plans to extend de-duplication technologies featured in EMC backup and recovery systems to other lines. “We will move the capabilities into the storage arrays over time,” said Donatelli.

De-duplication allows firms to minimise the volume of data stored by recognising redundancies, such as a duplicated file, and only storing these once.

EMC announced a number of new virtual-disk libraries featuring data de-duplication technology, including the EMC DL 3D 1500 and 3000, and the DL 4000, which adds a spin-down capability to reduce power.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group, said the announcements around de-duplication will keep EMC at the forefront of the networked storage field.

“Instead of allowing [software companies] to displace it, EMC is using its own expertise in the field. It will do wonderful things for its bottom line because software is such a high margin business in comparison with hardware,” Enderle explained.

EMC also announced it is using experience gained from the consumer market to make its storage products easier to use. Its LifeLine software, for example, allows network-attached storage appliances to be delivered to the consumer market and is available for licensing by other vendors.

As evidence of its ease of use, the firm said that customers now have the ability to do their own Clariion installations, as well as perform their own software upgrades on Celerra products without any on-site support. EMC is also offering a free upgrade to its Symmetrix Management Console, which it said will make storage easier and faster to manage.

However, Enderle warned that EMC faces increased competition from both IBM and HP, especially given the latter’s merger with EDS. “IBM is moving back into the storage space after letting its business languish in the 1990s, and EMC should be greatly concerned with anything IBM does,” he said.

On the subject of HP’s pending acquisition of EDS, EMC chief executive Joe Tucci was optimistic. “EDS is an important partner, and they would probably say we are one of their cornerstones,” he said. “It takes a long time to get the benefits of an al liance and I don’t think that EDS will abandon it very quickly.”

But Enderle disagreed with Tucci’s positive assessment. “HP and EDS will offer a cloud-based outsourcing model that is very aggressive and well ahead in the industry. Over time, EMC will realise the affinity EDS has with HP,” he said.

Meanwhile, some attendees at the conference were hoping to hear if EMC planned to offer its Networker backup and recovery tool as a managed service.

Donatelli conceded that such a move might be on the cards, but declined to elaborate or offer any definite timeframe.

Meanwhile, Vance Checketts, chief operating officer of Mozy, EMC’s software-as-a-service backup operation, revealed that the firm will unveil its first international datacentre within the next two months, and said this will benefit UK customers in particular.

“From a UK customer’s perspective, they will feel more secure knowing their data will be residing in Europe,” he said.