EMC extends flash storage for enterprises

With flash now an important part of your enterprise storage planning, EMC has expanded its product range with the Xtrem family of flash products.

EMC’s Xtrem family of flash-optimised server and storage products is a PCIe-based flash card that is designed to accelerate application performance.

XtremSF is server flash hardware, available in a broad set of eMLC and SLC capacities. It can be deployed as either direct attached storage within the server or in combination with EMC XtremSW Cache (this was previously known as VFCache) to improve network storage array performance while maintaining a level of protection for mission-critical environments.

This is not EMC’s first crack at flash storage products with Isilon, VMAX and XtremIO (formerly Project X) also on the market.

The XtremSF flash device is available in a broad range of eMLC (550 GB and 2.2 TB) and SLC (350 GB and 700 GB) capacities. When deployed with XtremSW Cache intelligent server flash caching software, XtremSF devices can be leveraged as a caching device with array protection for applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Exchange. EMC says that higher capacities will be available in the future.

In addition to the release, announced the release of XtremIO to select customers.

We spoke to Zahid Hussain, Senior VP and GM of EMC’s flash products division, told us that EMC has been working on ways to “take the local flash modules and find ways of pooling and clustering together so they look like a large pool of flash that’s available as primary storage”.

XtremIO is purpose built to leverage Flash as primary storage - it is not purely a caching tool. EMC is focusing this on applications that require high levels of random I/O performance, such as OLTP databases, server virtualisation and VDI.

“We’re starting to see that there’s a real acceleration of flash in the enterprise. It’s starting to become more mainstream and we’re seeing larger datasets being put on to flash. It’s breaking out of the niche,” according to Hussain.

Given the increased penetration of flash in enterprise storage systems, we asked if the days of the spinning hard drive are numbered. “I think it’s still a long way off,” according to Hussain. “There will remain capacity pools for a long time that will stay on spinning media.”

While data that is regularly accessed will move to flash storage, less frequently accessed data will stay on storage that can be easily accessed even though the access rates may be lower.

As XtremIO is a new product, the initial release is limited to select customers. Over time, availability will be expanded.