EMC's new storage federation box is likely to be called V-Plex, if information we've received is accurate.

The product is needed to federate local and global storage resources and enable Data at a Distance (DaaD), as described in a visionary presentation to US analysts by EMC's Pat Gelsinger, the head of the company's Information Infrastructure Products unit.

The data in federated data centres would be presented as a single, virtualised storage pool.

We have heard the V-Plex name in connection with EMC's storage federation initiative from a number of people. V-Plex has connotations of IBM's Sysplex (System Complex), a technology used to join or federate mainframes together so they function as a single compute resource.

EMC has a US federal trademark registration for V-Plex, which is there described as "Computer hardware and computer software for data management and data storage". It was filed on May 12, 2009.

Update: EMC declined to comment. ®