EMC Unveils New Products - Analyst Blog

A leading provider of information infrastructure solutions, EMC Corp (EMC), recently unveiled a number of new products aimed at extending its lead in all major storage markets.

EMC released more than 40 new technologies and products catering to every sphere and category of its business.

VNX Family of Products

EMC unveiled EMC VNX family of products that scales from entry-level to datacenter-class systems. The VNX family is developed by putting together EMC CLARiiON storage area network (SAN) and EMC Celerra network attached storage (NAS) systems into a single, unified suite of solutions.

EMC VNX entry series is a part of the VNX family designed specifically for small and medium sized businesses (SMB). EMC is offering the product through its partners at an initial price of under $10,000.

The VNX entry series is capable of storing hundreds of Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes, or a 1 terabyte VMware data store, in less-than-two minutes. The product automatically increases storage capacity (doubles) and provides automated processing and service. The product is scalable up to 120 disk drives (240 terabytes).

The VNX series, on its part, is ideal for medium sized to enterprise businesses as it runs three times faster than previous generation products. The product is scalable up to 2 petabytes per system (1000 disks).

With the advent of virtualization and rapid shift to cloud computing, storage, particularly for small and medium sized business, has gained immense importance in recent times.

According to IDC, worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a year-over-year growth of 19.0%, totaling slightly less than $5.2 billion, in the third quarter of 2010. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 4,299 petabytes, growing 65.2% year over year.

EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with a 26.1% market revenue share in the third quarter followed by IBM with 12.9% market share. NetApp and HP are in a statistical tie for the third place with 11.6% and 11.1% market share, respectively. Dell ended in the fifth position with 9.1% market share.

We believe the new VNX family will provide EMC a safe cushion to continue its leading position in worldwide external disk storage systems, particularly in the SMB sector where it faces significant competition from NetApp Inc. (NTAP).

Symmetrix VMAX Software

EMC released new software upgrades for its mission critical virtual data center storage system, Symmetrix VMAX, which requires no hardware upgrade. The software integrates Intel Corp's (INTC) Xeon technology into VMAX, making it the fastest storage system.

The newly released Fully Automated Storage Tiering with Virtual Pools (FAST VP) software delivers up to 40% more application performance at a 40% lower cost while requiring 87% fewer disks and 75% less power, as compared to single tier systems. The energy efficiencies of VMAX with FAST VP will enable customers to reduce power consumption in 2011 by over 270 million kilowatt hours.

EMC also released Federated Live Migration software that creates a new storage category, enabling faster technology migration that require zero application downtime and 75% less migration time, planning, and resources.

New virtual server integration software integrates 5 million virtual machines on a single VMAX. EMC also launched hardware-based encryption through its RSA Data Protection Manager that provides enhanced security.

The new native 10 Gigabit Ethernet supports network convergence across all host platform types, including virtual servers, open systems, and Mainframe environments.

Data Domain Archiver

EMC released the new Data Domain Archiver that has a throughput of 9.8 terabyte per hour and offers up to 768 terabyte of raw capacity with disk-based retention times of up to 7 or more years.

Our Take

Given the high adoption of virtualized environments as well as increased competition among the service providers, it has become imperative for competing firms to acquire additional tools and capabilities to gear for an extended virtualized environment. This calls for concerted focus on data storage capabilities going forward.

We expect strong demand from end users and vendors' as information technology investment remains robust. EMC with its latest data storage and upgraded software offerings will continue to lead the pack, in our view.

Moreover, EMC's recent acquisition of storage systems vendor, Isilon Systems, will enable EMC to gain a stronger foothold in the computer storage devices market. EMC expects the acquisition to be accretive to its bottom line in 2011. Management also expects combined revenues to reach $1 billion by the second half of 2012. 

However, EMC Corporation faces aggressive competition in the storage, networking and virtualization space from system vendors such as International Business Machines (IBM), NetApp, Hewlett-Packard Corp. (HPQ), Unisys Corp. (UIS) and Hitachi Data Systems.

Currently, EMC Corporation has a short-term Zacks #2 Rank that corresponds with our long-term Neutral recommendation on the stock.