FAST will be available in the fourth quarter of 2009 for both V-Max and DMX-4.

The V-Max will not replace the DMX-4, nor will it make EMC's new Atmos cloud storage software obsolete, the company says. Atmos is designed to manage petabytes of information across tens or hundreds of geographic locations, using x86 servers with high-capacity, low-cost SATA drives.

Atmos is mainly for unstructured or semi-structured data needed to run social networking applications and Web sites that provide content like photos and video. Symmetrix arrays, Wambach says, are for mission-critical applications including ERP, transactional systems, e-mail, databases and electronic trading.

EMC has optimized V-Max for VMware's hypervisor and Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software, but not for Citrix's XenServer. "We see right now that the majority of customer demand is for VMware and Microsoft," Wambach says.

Although EMC stressed that V-Max will not replace the DMX-4, it said the new product triples the performance of the DMX-4 while offering twice the connectivity, and three times the usable capacity. V-Max is also more power efficient, EMC says.

EMC says it has shipped more than 30 V-Max systems to beta customers including the European bank UniCredit Group, which is testing V-Max to improve database performance during peak workload times.