I am a little kid at heart and mind so whenever someone says “Flash” I immediately play Queen in my head and visions of Flash Gordon pop to mind. The truth is the song isn’t that far off of how Flash storage helps with datacenter I/O loads it really is doer of the impossible. EMC recently announced XtremIO which is our foray into the all flash array. It opened up to some criticism from the competitive market which is of course expected as EMC is somewhat late to the game in all flash storage, but that doesn’t mean that flash hasn’t been part of the EMC portfolio.
In fact XtremSF which is EMC’s server based flash solution (SF stands for server flash) has been around for some time. VNX has had Flash drive integration for caching (Fast Cache) for even longer. So really to say EMC just started caring about Flash because of market pressure isn’t a reality. The thing is that EMC didn’t want to jump into the All Flash Array (AFA) market without thinking about how Flash storage works.