EMC joined the storage virtualization pack last week as the storage giant unveiled its EMC Invista Network Storage Virtualizaiton Platform at its annual user conference.

“EMC views network storage virtualization as a key enabling technology to address customer challenges such as the inability to schedule planned downtime, the constraints of inflexible storage infrastructures, and the need to simplify management of complex storage environments,” said Mark Lewis, EMC’s executive vice president and chief development officer.

EMC’s product gives users additional storage options. “We want to see how this works. If it can help us better utilize our storage systems, we’ll definitely be interested,” said Mack Kigada, an IT manager at Providence Health System.

Invista, which is Italian for “in sight,” will not ship until July, but EMC now has an official product to put up against the Enterprise Virtualization Array from Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi’s virtualized TagmaStore system, and IBM’s SAN Volume Controller. Like those products, Invista creates an abstract view of disks in a SAN and helps to make LUN (logical unit number) management simpler.

Unlike the storage virtualization products from Hitachi and IBM, Invista runs “out of band,” which means the process of mapping logical addresses takes place in SAN switches from Brocade Communications Systems, Cisco Systems, and, beginning in 2006, McData. HP, Hitachi, and IBM place the process of mapping either within the array or in the data path.

In other virtualization news, HP upgraded its Enterprise Virtualization Arrays with new replication features. HP added Snapclone, which makes copies of disks for long-term preservation, and Snapshot, which creates short-lived images of disks for backup.