EMC announced Tuesday a slew of news about its flash product lines. The biggest news is that the all-solid-state XtremIO scale-out array is moving from beta test to a controlled introduction, where customers can actually order it. EMC also announced it's expanding its range of PCIe SSDs, now called XtremSF. The company is also rebranding its server-side caching software from VFcache to XtremSW.

I've written about XtremIO before, most recently here. XtremeIO's scale-out fibre channel architecture fits EMC's customers well. The future of storage is definitely scale out, and established storage vendors will have to develop, or acquire, purpose-built, all-solid-state systems like XtremIO to compete.

Much of EMC's presentation centered around server-side flash. The company announced four new PCIe SSDs with capacities from 550 GB to 2.2 TB. The new SSDs all have x8 host interfaces, while some competitors use just four lanes. I am in awe of a multi-terabyte SSD, even if EMC's 2.2 TBs doesn't challenge the 11-TB behemoth Violin Memory announced this week