EMC made the announcement at its customer forum at Gillette Stadium here.

Eric Herzog, EMC vice president of product management, said that while the VNX array had optional SSDs previously, the new VNX5500-F model is preconfigured and contains more solid state drive slots.

combines the block-level storage area network (SAN) capabilities of EMC's midrange Clariion array with its network-attached storage (NAS) Celerra controller.

EMC president Pat Gelsinger said EMC will end-of-life the Clariion line as of January 2012. The company will continue to support the product with services for five years after that.

The new VNX5500-F utilizes 2.5-in, single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash drives to 10 times the performance of the hard-drive based VNX arrays.