After watching a rerun of the EMC World opening session I felt compelled to underscore the excitement we’re seeing from our customers regarding “The Beast” aka XtremIO 4.0!
Of course bigger clusters, bigger capacities and bigger IOPS numbers tend to get all the fanfare at a launch event but, perhaps surprisingly, these capabilities are not the sole reason customers select XtremIO for their transactional workloads.
Deep within “The Beast” is something of inherent beauty – an architecture that can start small and grow to over a petabyte. An architecture that scales out linearly and delivers consistent, predictable sub-millisecond latency. An architecture that enables data services to be inline, all of the time. And an architecture that enables incredible simplicity and ease of use.
None of this beauty was created just for “The Beast”. But it is because of this beauty that we were able to create “The Beast”.
But is this beauty only skin deep?
Let’s recount recent history. When we first announced XtremIO, just eighteen months ago, much of the fanfare in the flash segment was around upstarts such as Violin Memory and FusionIO. Neither company was promoting an “array” as the best use for flash in the enterprise and their new model for storage promised the inevitable demise of all established storage vendors.
As we sit today, recently confirmed by Gartner, EMC market share for All Flash Arrays now exceeds EMC market share for general purpose storage arrays. FusionIO is gone and Violin is on the ropes, ironically while trying to create an array. Sure, there are new pretenders – their pitch sounding eerily familiar to those of yesterday – but here at EMC we’re remaining incredibly focused on delivering against our roadmap and driving customer success.
And we’re not done with flash. Not by a long way. Later this year we’ll release DSSD to market. We believe DSSD will once again change the game for flash in the data center. But this time for next generation in-memory database workloads and high performance big data analytics. There’s much beauty in DSSD too, but that’s another story.
