EMC has added a line of storage systems to its Celerra NAS range that boast advanced file de-duplication and file retention capabilities.

The new Celerra NS systems, which include iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity, are designed to lower the expense of enterprise storage at a time when many businesses are struggling with costs, according to the company.

Peter Thayer, multi-protocol group director of marketing at EMC, explained that the de-duplication capabilities used in EMC's Avamar and RecoverPoint backup and recovery systems had been integrated natively with the Celerra NS-120, NS-480 and NS-960 to compress inactive files and remove copies in the Celerra product.

The new functionality could increase file system capacity by up to 50 per cent, Thayer said.

The NS line will also offer improved file-level retention to enable write once, read many functionality on files, and a new compliance option that stops locked files from being deleted. Thayer claimed that this would help businesses with information governance and compliance.

"Before, firms would have had to use a separate system such as Centera to archive files, but now they will have the archive capabilities within the Celerra offering," said Thayer.

The de-duplication and retention capabilities can be retro-fitted to old Celerra systems, or purchased with new versions from March 2009.

Celerra storage comes with a choice of tiers. Customers can choose enterprise Flash drive technology, or low power Sata II drives which optimise data placement on the storage system.

EMC will also offer plug-ins for Celerra that will improve its integration with VMware environments, such as VMware vCenter, that will help customers to revert to their original virtual infrastructure if a failover occurs through VMware Site Recovery Manager.

Thayer said that attendees at EMC World 2009 in May can expect to see similar data de-duplication and retention capabilities added to more platforms across the firm's portfolio, along with new forms of Flash drive.