EMC Corporation has announced three major storage integration improvements in its VMware vSphere 4.1 that bring a brace of storage features to its virtualization platform.

Unveiled Tuesday, the new storage integrations are tailored to enable customers big and small to improve their VMware environments. The new VMware vSphere 4.1 features new VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI).

The three new storage integration points are Full Copy, Block Zero, and Hardware Assisted Locking. The full copy feature enables customers to achieve up to 10 times faster virtual machine creation and data movement using VMware Storage vMotion.

Block Zero is hardware accelerated initialization that reduces input/output by as much as 10 times while hardware assisted locking improves the performance of many common tasks including virtual machine migration.

"EMC is working as closely as ever with VMware to expand out integration points for customers to easily take advantage of new VMware technology advancements," said EMC's Chad Sakac, vice president, VMware Technology Alliance, in a statement. "Our broad portfolio integrates at every level of the vSphere stack -- for every customer, using every protocol and solutions of every scale."

VAAI is the newest set of APIs that are added to the VMware vStorage API family. These include the VMware vStorage API for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, which customers can utilize to reduce the recovery time objectives of a site disaster.

VMware vStorage API for Data Protection leverages the snapshop capabilities of VMware vSphere to enable virtual machine image backup without downtime. VMware vStorage API for Multipathing provides multipathing integration with EMC PowerPath.