Sources say details on the next generation Clariion will be disclosed in April with the systems going GA in June although some features won’t make it until the fall.

Deeper integration with VMware — “integration not available elsewhere,” according to one source – is supposedly a big feature of the new Clariion. EMC will apparently play up storage virtualization as well, although it’s unclear yet what new virtualization features will be included. Another improvement is easier upgrades of disk shelves, controllers, firmware, core OS, array-based software, and so on.

But perhaps the most interesting thing to watch will be whether EMC adds support for NFS and CIFS, as some expect. This would be the next step in integrating Clariion and EMC’s Celerra unified storage. EMC isn’t ready to end-of-life Celerra yet, but the new Clariion could be confirmation that it is going in that direction. Sources say the vendor already has a name for the new converged system — EMC V-CX.

EMC’s last major Clariion upgrade, the Clariion CX4, came in August of 2008 and it added a high density version in January.