Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 (see our coverage highlights here), Pat Gelsinger, EMC’s president and COO, revealed that his company is already shipping Project Lightning to beta customers.  The product was first announced back at EMC World in May, and is a PCI-e flash card.  Early customers received the 320GB version. The technology brings data closer to the CPU, and can also be leveraged to tier storage using EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (Fast) tech.

Gelsinger said in an interview that his company is going mainly after the big data market with the new product.

“One of the potential use cases for the technology  is in IT infrastructures running the Hadoop data processing engine, Gelsinger told ZDNet UK, as Hadoop requires “very high bandwidth access to data but the compute load is very modest.”

It’s notable that Project Lightening can also be a way for EMC to get into the server market because it would also be possible to run VMs from these cards, but Gelsinger said that’s not what they’re going for at the moment.

EMC has a big presence in this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, and big data was one of the main highlights. Bill Schmarzo, CTO of EIM for the storage giant talked about big data from his point of view at theCube: companies are facing a growing need to adopt new sources of data and new tools to help them gain insight from that data, though the considerations vary by default. The quality of data is again becoming a priority in some areas, Schmarzo noted, and also covered a number of other things such as how EMC is venturing into this space.

Backup was the second topic the company is focusing on during the conference. Steven Manley, CTO of EMC’s Backup and Recovery, and Mel Shum, a consultant at EMC, discussed backup, virtualization and Oracle at theCube.