Halamka said he's not yet familiar with the new low-end product, but said he expects it to offer the reliability he finds on the high-end EMC backup systems at the medical school.

Meanwhile, The Black & Decker Corp. in Towson, Md., plans to evaluate the new low-end model for its remote sites, said Ian McLeavy, manager of global engineering storage. The company already uses EMC's 700 series of high-end Clariion disk backup systems, he said.

EMC will also announce today that the full Clariion line of tape drives will now support the IBM iSeries platform and EMC's NetWorker 7.3 backup and recovery software, which EMC gained in its acquisition of Legato Systems Inc. more than two years ago.

This latest announcement shows that EMC is paying attention to user complaints that the company's various acquisitions have not been well integrated, said John Webster, an analyst at Data Mobility Group LLC in Nashua, N.H.

Solheim is a reporter for the IDG News Service.