EMC will fall short of its quarterly target, the storage blimp revealed today.

Preliminary numbers show Q2 brought in $2.575bn, missing the $2.66bn forecast it made in April. The news is embarrassing for EMC finance chiefs, given they made a point of reiterating their conservative predictions to a disappointed Wall Street in June. GAAP earnings per share have been downgraded to $0.12 from $0.13 on the figures.

The new lower number barely improves upon Q1's $2.55bn revenue.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci said: "We received more customer orders than we anticipated very late in June for our new EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 systems, and fewer than anticipated customer orders for our prior-generation Symmetrix DMX-2 systems, and we therefore did not have the right inventory mix to fulfill demand as we closed the quarter."

See EMC's news release here. The full quarterly financials are due Friday.®