The appliance rests between the storage network switches and the storage array.

Gallagher said the VPLEX appliances can scale from two to eight nodes or locations. When it comes to clustered applications, such as Oracle RAC or VMware HA, however, replication distances are limited to 100 kilometers, he said.

In addition to the new functionality, EMC also reduced the size of the appliance by using smaller rack-mounted boxes with more powerful Intel multi-core processors, PCI Gen 2 cards for faster throughput, and new 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN interfaces for faster communications between clusters.

EMC is charging $100,000 for an appliance with 1TB of capacity on it, but Gallagher said street prices would vary depending on the size of the implementation.

In related news, EMC also announced has added support for native Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity on its high-end Symmetrix VMAX array.