An official statement from EMC World 2012 revealed that the storage giant will be making a total of 42 product announcements during the event. That’s just enough for this year’s Megalaunch to raise the bar beyond the previous record set back in 2011, with 41 product-related updates.

It’s Day 1 of the conference, and a few of the most significant announcements already hit the press. Coming out of Las Vegas is word on new and improved storage systems, scattered across the company’s entire portfolio.

The entry level category now features the VNXe 3150, which supposedly delivers 50 percent more performance and capacity than the previous generation of the solution. And in turn, the higher end family of storage arrays based on the VMAX operating system has also been extended with the addition of the 40K model.

The existing configurations, a low end system with a capacity of 1.5 petabytes and a more advanced one with 2PBs, have been renamed to VMAX 10K and VMAX 20K, respectively. The new 40K packs twice as much capacity than the latter, its predecessor, and doubled performance with up to 32 2.8GHz Intel Xeons under the hood. Each chip features six cores.

In addition, the 40K ships with one terabyte of ECC-protected DDR3 DRAM, improved networking and a number of other enhancements.

The VNXe 3150 and VMAX 40K storage systems are far from being the only new kids on the block. EMC will be showcasing the latest version of the Isilon OneFS scale-out NAS operating system, and the company is aggressively branching out to other industries as well.

One such area is networking. This year a more diverse lineup of companies is attending, including Juniper Networks and Arista, while big data once again made it to the flyers and is in fact the big slogan behind Megalaunch  part 2.