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EMC's Midrange Makeover

EMCs overhaul of its Clariion offerings today may well have set the tone for the midrange market over the next few years.

By adding solid state disks, virtual provisioning, spin-down disk technology, and a host of other features to its CX4, EMC has issued a clear challenge to rivals such as HP and IBM.

“[The] new Clariion CX4 series should rejuvenate EMC’s midrange systems sales in Q3 and Q4,” wrote Kaushik Roy, senior analyst at Pacific Growth Equities, in a research note released this morning. “Note [that] EMC is going to be the first to market with Flash drives in the midrange storage -- EMC’s new CX4 will heighten the competition with IBM, HP, and NetApp.”

EMC’s midrange growth had decelerated to about 8 percent in the vendor’s Q2 results, compared to the high-end DMX, which grew 10 percent year-over-year, he explained.

Like many people, Roy expects that there will be very limited adoption of Flash technology this year, with less than 1 percent of CX4s sold with Flash, but he feels that EMC has nonetheless made a very shrewd move.

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