At the Storage Networking World show April 3-6 in San Diego, EMC will join its close partner Dell to announce the new EMC Clariion AX150 for Fibre Channel connectivity and the AX150i for iSCSI connectivity.

The networked storage systems can support as many as 10 host servers and scale from 750GB to 6TB of capacity. The products will be added to EMC's Insignia product line built for SMBs (small and midsize businesses) and branch offices.

The downsized boxes provide an iSCSI installation wizard and support for SATA (Serial ATA) II disk drives. They also can support as many as eight concurrent array-based data snapshots to bolster backup and recovery.

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EMC will unveil its unified information retention, storage and security policy offerings for archived data in the form of EMC Documentum Archive Services for Email and EMC Documentum Archive Services for Reports software.

Symantec will announce its Veritas NetBackup 6.0 PureDisk Remote Office Edition. Currently available, the software provides global single-instance storage to reduce disk capacity and bandwidth constraints, removes manual tape handling and administration chores, and secures data via encryption and policy enforcement, Symantec officials said.

Click here to read more about how EMC's offerings can aid compliance efforts.

Cisco Systems is eyeing physical and virtual data consolidation in the data center via its 13-slot Cisco MDS (Multilayer DataCenter Switch) 9513, which features twice the core density of previous Cisco directors.

Emphasizing scalability, the new product accepts all existing MDS 9000 family modules and provides higher-speed interfaces of up to 528 ports.

Cisco also is announcing new 4G-bps and 10G-bps Fibre Channel switching modules, as well as new port bandwidth and IPv6 features added to its SAN-OS 3.0 software.

Symantec's partner program addresses compliance and ECM issues. Read more here.

Hitachi Data Systems, a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., will announce its new midrange Hitachi TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage AMS1000 system, which offers 32 logical cache partitions to boost application performance and move data on the fly and unimpeded across multiple storage tiers.

The product is currently available and provides multiprotocol support for iSCSI, Fibre Channel and NAS (network-attached storage).

As the successor to HDS' Thunder 9585V midrange system, the AMS1000 delivers 13G bps of cached bandwidth, full 4G-bps Fibre Channel connectivity, support for 4,096 LUNs (logical unit numbers) and 16GB of cache.

HDS also will roll out its new Hitachi HiCommand software, which gives storage administrators an integrated, multipath management console.

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