The thousands of storage experts, vendors and other industry insiders who descended upon The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas today for EMC Corp.’s annual conference were greeted by a raft of new products spanning its entire portfolio. Since the vendor last refreshed its array lineup only a couple months ago, the roster features just a single major hardware addition, but what the update lacks in volume it more than makes up for in significance.

Unifying the portfolio

Unity is a new family of flash systems that target small to midsize businesses, branch offices and other environments where not a lot of capital can be allotted to technology infrastructure. As a result, the series places an emphasis on affordability, with the smallest hybrid models coming in at under $18,000. The arrays also attempt to reduce administrative expenses by automating many of the most common tasks involved in everyday management operations.

The Unity family boasts built-in encryption features, replication functionality for copying and backing up data plus integration with popular hypervisors, which makes it possible to manage an array from the same place as the servers it’s supporting. EMC says that the lineup can also be deployed in conjunction with Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM), one of the several new software offerings it’s showcasing at the conference alongside the flash systems.

Reducing $51 billion in waste

As the name implies, eCDM is designed to rein in the massive number of backups, snapshots and other duplicate datasets that are scattered throughout the average storage environment. A large portion of that information is unused or kept on infrastructure that would better serve other workloads, a phenomenon IDC estimates will produce $51 billion worth of wasted capacity by 2018.

That represents a substantial market opportunity that EMC is not alone in targeting. The last few years have seen several venture-backed startups hit the scene with the specific goal of helping organizations free up their misused storage capacity. One of the biggest in the bunch, the Menlo Park-based Delphix Inc., is reportedly even considering to go public. EMC hopes to set eCDM apart by offering a premium analytics add-on that can generate advise on how to solve inefficiencies discovered by the tool.

The company’s focus on reducing the amount of manual work involved in using its products also carries over the new version of ViPR that debuted in conjunction. The software-defined storage platform now comes with a high-level application management interface that makes it possible to centrally provision different kinds of storage capacity for a workload. According to EMC, the functionality can come particularly handy in hybrid environments that combine on- and off-premise infrastructure resources.

Bridging the divide

The storage vendor is focusing on both resource types in its growth effort. In addition to the traditional data center products introduced this morning, the company is also launching a new managed data protection platform for backing up information stored on its hardware. The service is hosted by Virtustream Inc., the infrastructure-as-a-service provider it acquired for $1.2 billion last year. And it’s joined by a web-based monitoring console called MyService360 that enables customers to monitor the health of their environments in real-time.

The tool provides the ability to track not only key operational data like performance but also specific configuration issues, which makes it relatively straightforward for administrators to identify where their expertise is needed. MyService360 is available immediately at no charge for every EMC customer with an active support contract.

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