"Part of the challenge you have in a VMware environment is there are so many VMs that if you try to crawl through everything to see what data has changed, you'll never get things done in time," said Shane Jackson, vice president of marketing for EMC's Backup Recovery Systems Division. "You need VMware to be able to tell us, here are the three things that have changed since your last backup, so this is what you need to look for on your recovery."

Through its VMware ownership, EMC also integrated its VFCache server flash cards with vSphere and announced deduplication on the cards.

The VFCache server cards, used alongside hard disk drives, form a tier of high-performance storage within a server that is accessible via the system's fast PCIe bus. By deduplicating the data before it's written to the flash on the cards, it delivers better cost-per-gigabyte of capacity and extends the life expectancy of the PCIe flash card, EMC said.

VFCache's new interoperability with VMware vSphere vMotion enables data migration between servers using flash.