All flash storage? This is the year says EMC

“This is the year for all flash storage”, EMC has announced. EMC has unveiled its VMAX All Flash enterprise data services platform and EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash system this week.

The solutions underscore the company’s commitment to all-flash arrays for primary storage, said the company. By 2020, EMC estimates that all storage used for production applications will be flash-based, with traditional disks primarily used for bulk and archive storage only.

VMAX All Flash is designed 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. DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash solutions are aimed at traditional and next-generation use cases that require “microsecond latencies” such as real-time analytics for Hadoop and Oracle.

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 combination of a lifetime flat-price maintenance model and lifetime “flash endurance protection”.

IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni said: “Anyone could easily predict that flash would someday overtake traditional disks 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.

Jeremy Burton, president of products and marketing at EMC, said: “With the introduction of VMAX All Flash and DSSD D5 there is virtually no data centre 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 centre of tomorrow.”

@AntonySavvas