Additionally, EMC announced its now come native with inline data deduplication. The firmware is interoperable with VSphere vMotion to enable the migration of virtual machines (VMs) residing on flash memory.

VMware, which is owned by EMC, said the two companies developed vSphere 5.1 to simplify the setup and management of backups for VMs through a single VMware console.

The new capability, called vSphere Data Protection (VDP), replaces vSphere's Data Recovery function and is included with all editions of vSphere Essentials+ and above.

"Smaller businesses and departments within larger organizations are the primary beneficiaries of this initial release, as well those who are at the outset of their virtualization journey," said David Vellante, co-founder of The Wikibon Project, a Web 2.0 community for IT professionals.