EMC Corporation announced a quantum leap forward in its enterprise storage strategy with major additions to the industry’s leading all-flash storage solutions to address mixed, consolidated and the world’s most performance-intensive enterprise workloads. Complementing the industry-leading XtremIO all-flash array, the announcement of EMC’s flagship VMAX All Flash enterprise data services platform and EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash solution (see related news releases linked above) underscores EMC’s commitment to all-flash arrays for primary storage. EMC’s flash portfolio is designed to address virtually any enterprise data center use case, enabling the Modern Data Center. By 2020, EMC estimates that all storage used for production applications will be flash-based; traditional disk will primarily be used for bulk and archive storage only.
EMC’s all-flash portfolio is purpose-built to address virtually any enterprise data center use case:
- XtremIO all-flash arrays for accelerating and consolidating mixed block storage workloads such as databases, analytics, server virtual machines, and virtual desktop infrastructures that require consistent and predictable performance with sub-millisecond latencies. XtremIO is designed to address most high-end enterprise workloads with some of the industry’s best inline data compression and de-duplication capabilities for improved capacity economics.
- VMAX All Flash for consolidating mixed block and file workloads that require up to “six-nines” of enterprise availability, rich data services, IBM mainframe and iSeries support, and scalable storage growth. VMAX All Flash offers the gold standard of replication, recovery, data services and quality of service, re-engineered with all flash to deliver up to four petabytes (PB) of storage capacity.
- DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash – a new flash storage category with breakthrough performance – for the most performance-intensive, traditional and next-generation use cases that require microsecond latencies such as real-time analytics for Hadoop and Oracle.
- VNX Series arrays provide EMC’s simplest and most economic all-flash offering. The all-flash VNXe starts at less than $25K and offers support for file and block workloads for midrange enterprises and departmental workloads.
EMC’s Converged Platforms division, VCE will deliver new Converged Infrastructure offerings based on these all-flash building blocks.
Solid State Drives Overtake Traditional Disk for Primary Storage
As the first vendor to offer Solid State Drives (SSDs) in enterprise storage arrays in 2008, EMC has continuously innovated and evolved its storage portfolio to deliver products that address customer needs for performance, reliability and rich data services at competitive price points. Both the technology and market evolution of SSDs has reached the point of making all-flash arrays cost-effective for general-purpose enterprise data storage. EMC will continue leveraging a variety of flash media in its all-flash products including 3D NAND and future cutting-edge flash technologies.
Higher flash drive density, lower failure rates, lower power consumption and operating temperatures relative to traditional disk arrays also contribute to enterprise storage platforms that require less data center floor space, power and cooling.
According to IDC’s most recent Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, EMC is the market share leader in all-flash storage solutions at 39%, more than the next three competitors combined and is also the market share leader in enterprise storage solutions that include both all-flash and hybrid flash storage arrays. EMC storage solutions based on hybrid configurations will be offered primarily for bulk data storage capacity and archive requirements.
Modern Pricing and Packaging for the Modern Data Center
Building on overwhelmingly positive customer feedback for the simplified pricing and packaging of its XtremIO all-flash arrays, EMC is extending its Xpect More Program to offer customers simplified planning, deployment and management for the new VMAX All Flash array. The Xpect More Program offers the unique combination of a lifetime flat-price maintenance model and lifetime flash endurance protection. This not only removes many typical barriers to adoption of new technologies, it gives customers the ability to plan future procurement in a more predictable and efficient manner.
Industry Analyst Quote:
Ashish Nadkarni, Program Director IDC
“Anyone could easily predict that flash would someday overtake traditional disk for primary storage workloads purely for price/performance. What has been less clear until now is how many different workloads can benefit from the inherent agility that flash storage has to offer beyond raw speed. EMC is showing through the introduction of its newest all-flash products how purpose-built all-flash solutions can deliver distinct benefits across a variety of general-purpose and performance-intensive application workloads.”
EMC Executive Quote:
Jeremy Burton, President of Products and Marketing, EMC Corporation
“Today’s enterprise customer wants to enable their business with modern data centers that deliver agility, efficiency and speed. We’re expanding upon EMC’s primary storage strengths and all-flash leadership, built with XtremIO. With the introduction of VMAX All Flash and DSSD D5 there is virtually no data center use case we’re unable to address from traditional high-end enterprise workloads, to use cases that people haven’t even dreamt about in the data center of tomorrow.”