Having spent much of the past year bolstering its software portfolio, EMC will return to its bread and butter next week with a series of storage hardware announcements aimed at giving customers greater flexibility, capacity and performance.

The company is expected to announce Feb. 9:

• A set of Symmetrix storage arrays called the DMX2, which have twice as many drives and processors as previous DMXs and promise higher performance.
  
  

• A series of midrange Clariion arrays - the CX300, CX500 and CX700 - that EMC says are faster but not more expensive than previous versions.
  
  

• New replication, back-up and recovery and snapshot capabilities for the Clariions.
  
  

• One of the first implementations of the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), a standard for managing heterogeneous storage.
  
  

With these announcements, EMC is aligning the release of its Symmetrix products with its Clariion arrays, furthering the ultimate convergence of the product lines.

"It makes perfect sense that they are trying to wed everything together, because as they move forward the lines are going to continue to blur between what's Clariion and what's Symmetrix," says Bob Moore, vice president of IT for telecom provider Paetec Communications in Fairport, N.Y. Moore's company uses Symmetrix, Clariion and Centera gear.

EMC uses many of the same disk drives and components in its Symmetrix and Clariion arrays to keep costs down - a process EMC calls commonality.

"We've worked very hard in going to commonality," says Dave Donatelli, EMC's executive vice president of storage platforms operations in a recent interview.

"We ship products that all have the same disk drives. We are able to use a fundamental building block and leverage that across all of our products," he adds.

EMC's NS600 network-attached storage (NAS) product is one example of commonality. It uses the same hardware as the Clariion CX600, with unique software added that lets it join a Symmetrix array to the Ethernet network, he says.

Users say commonality is an advantage when it comes to buying storage gear.

"For instance, if you buy the higher-end Clariion unit, it's upgradeable to the lower-end Symmetrix," Moore says. "If you are a corporate user, it gets awfully costly to always have those high-end features on tap, so if you are rolling out a small deployment, you can technology-protect your investment by upgrading [from one to the other]."