We’ll be streaming live from this week’s New York EMC event, but before the company spills the beans about their big news for today, there have already been two notable developments this week worth highlighting.  First up, EMC will release the VNX unified storage platform this Tuesday to boost the competition with NetApp, whose FAS platform offers block and file capabilities.

“But while EMC has been silent, SearchStorage.com has obtained product sheets EMC issued on the VNX models, and gathered more information by talking to industry insiders who have been briefed by EMC and spoke on the condition of anonymity.”

According to EMC’s marketing materials, VNX is the company’s next generation mid-range system combining Clariion CX4 and Celerra NS into one brand. The VNX platform reportedly consists of the VNX7500 and four configurations of the VNX5000 series the launch will also include the VNXe3100 and VNXe3300 storage systems.

In other EMC news, IT performance company Riverbed Technology announced today its Riverbed Steelhead appliance received the EMC E-Lab qualification for EMC RecoverPoint. This will enable the company to boost its offerings portfolio and will improve joint customers’ return for their data protection investment in the form of less repetitive data, reduced costs and accelerated DR processes.

We’ve also discussed the rise in EMC shares to $24.31, and its still active pursuit of Novell’s open-source cloud patents. EMC had also witnessed the departure of exec Frank Slootman and his joining at venture firm Greylock partners.  Read here to learn more about the launch of the RSA SecurID Software Token for Android.