EMC also announced it has integrated software from an earlier acquisition that will allow the consolidation of network attached storage (NAS) systems by using a single global name space. EMC said its RainStorage software virtualizes Windows, Unix and Linux file systems across heterogeneous NAS systems and file servers, making individual boxes appear to be a single unit to a host server. Data can also be moved between physical NAS servers without disrupting business applications.

The RainStorage software comes from EMC's August acquisition of Rainfinity Inc.

"People say they like their first file server, and the first half dozen or so..., but when they went beyond that, they didn't like it so much anymore," Donatelli said.

The upgrade to EMCs Celerra NAS system also allows users to take advantage of so called "thin provisioning" technology, which allows administrators to automate the provisioning of storage to applications, he said.

Using traditional storage provisioning methods, IT managers had to purchase additional capacity up front and over allocate storage to ensure applications wouldn't suffer from storage limitations. With thin provisioning, applications are only given the disk space they need to store data. The array maintains a buffer of spare disk space and either automatically provisions or alerts systems administrators to allocate more when that buffer starts to run out.