EMC added four new models to its mid range Celerra line with the NS-120, NS-480, NS-960 and NS-G8 Gateway.

NAS (network attached storage), iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity are built along with file system deduplication, file-level retention and compliance capabilities with the five-nines (99.999%) reliability.

The number of disks has more than doubled and CLARiiON CX4 capabilities to provide up to 22 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to other systems in the market, the company said. Mixing flash and SATA II storage formats is also possible. "The new Celerra lineup supports the mixing of Enterprise Flash and low power SATA II drives, helping drive down costs, providing flexibility and improving power efficiency."EMC now offers a mix of SATA II and Enterprise Flash drives across all of its major storage platforms.

Flash drives are finding their way into the data center for high performance as it can result in up to an 800 percent performance improvement (see below - Ten Essential facts about solid state disk drives) compared to traditional Fibre Channel drives giving sub-millisecond response times and are 98 percent more energy efficient on an IOPs (Input/Output operations Per Second) basis.

SATA II disk drives require 32 percent less energy per terabyte than traditional one terabyte SATA disk drives.

Use with VMware is a major focus for use in VMware and other virtualized environments with new management tools available with the Celerra line up.

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, which is internationally recognized for its research and education in natural and engineering sciences, uses multiple Celerra NS systems for its Fileservices, VMware, Oracle and Exchange environments and beta tested the new Celerra Data Deduplication feature.

"Our EMC Celerra systems support some of the most critical applications for our university and staff, including 3,000 Exchange clients as well as I/O intensive research applications, the internet presence of more than 250 institutes and the home directories of 35,000 students and staff members,"said Uli Betzler, Senior Storage Architect, KIT. "Given that some of our clients put a very high workload on the systems, we strive to make our VMware, NFS and iSCSI storage environments as efficient as possible. The Celerra Data Deduplication feature showed a 25 percent reduction in the amount of primary data in our fileservice environment, while improving overall system performance. Many of the files stored on the Celerra are large and deduplication will result in cost savings for the KIT with the benefit of faster access to the files. Beyond that, even the small files in typical user profiles show an impressive compression ratio with EMC's Data Deduplication feature."

Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President, EMC Storage Division, said, "Customers have asked us to help them remove cost and complexity from their IT environments. EMC has a history of incorporating features and flexibility into its Celerra systems that others in the industry either can't or view as stand-alone products. The new Celerra systems continue this tradition and integrate numerous innovative new capabilities, at no additional charge, into a single, easy-to-use system."

Steve Scully, Research Manager, Enterprise Storage Systems at IDC, said, "Unified storage is clearly an area where customers are getting this value as well as increasing the operational efficiency of their environments. By consolidating VMware, Windows, Linux and Unix environments onto a single Celerra NS system, IT managers gain a tremendous amount of flexibility and the ability to deploy and update the latest storage technologies across all application environments as needs dictate."

Earlier this year Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and EMC CEO Joe Tucci extended a partnership deal