EMC’s latest product update comes from Greenplum, the PostgreSQL database and analytics software maker it acquired last year. The news is the announcement of Greenplum Database 4.2, which features a whole line of improvements that make the product much more attractive to enterprise customers.

The first tweak is an update to gNET, the tool that’s used to import and export data to the warehouse which can now do carry out this task in a parallel fashion. In addition that dedupe technology from Data Domain, another company EMC acquired, has been added to the database solution in order to consolidate two of the processes in these sorts of big data environments. The new backup also makes use of the efficiency of parallel processing in order to achieve higher performance; in a test conducted by its maker a 173TB data warehouse was deduplicated in less than eight hours.

Last but not least, perhaps the biggest addition that’s rolling out with Greenplum DB 4.2 is the Command Center. The very appropriately named management console will be replacing the PerfMon tool, and introduces a host of new features. Among these is the ability to access it from the web, and more admin functionality such as the ability to manage individual queries and database mirrors. And of course there’s the added integration.

“Command Center is also able to reach out across the network into a Greenplum HD or MR Hadoop cluster and check the state of the cluster from inside this console. “Over time, Command Center will evolve to have broader and deeper coverage of the database and Hadoop platforms,” Mike Maxey of Greenplum says.

Overall, EMC’s open-source data investment has turned out to be a good one. The subsidiary even got a title from Forrester for its Hadoop distro.