EMC has begun deployment of its Unisphere storage management console.

The company said that it would be offering the new interface as a free upgrade to supported customers of its SAN and NAS storage systems.

The Unisphere update will seek to simplify and automate many of the tasks associated with storage systems. Additionally, the update will add a number of new components to improve performance of storage appliances.

Among the new components will be the latest version of EMC's Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) platform.

First unveiled in May at the company's EMC World conference, the platform allows administrators to manage both conventional storage and solid-state drive (SSD) storage appliances.

Virtualisation is also a major function of the update. The company has bundled a set of plug-ins and components to optimise storage integration with VMware virtualised servers, building on a virtualisation strategy outlined earlier this year by Pat Gelsinger.

Product marketing director Jon Siegel told V3.co.uk that the update should bring a major overhaul to the company's mid-range line and help businesses shift to high-performance storage hardware.

"We think that from a software perspective this is one of the more important announcements we have made," said Siegel.

"We feel like we are fundamentally changing how mid-range storage is managed in the market."

The update will also bring new hardware. EMC is releasing an update for its Celera gateway line. The VG2 and VG8 appliances will add Intel's Westmere processors, a move that the company said will double performance over previous models and add support for up to 62 processor cores.