EMC said its new range can deliver what the firm calls rack-scale flash to meet the demanding requirements of big data and high-performance analytics. EMC claims it is now committed to an all-flash line-up across its primary storage offerings, including VMAX, XtremIO, VNX and the new DSSD D5 rack-scale flash platform.

Jeremy Burton, EMC's president of products and marketing said:

"Today's enterprise customer wants to enable their business with modern data centres that deliver agility, efficiency and speed. We're expanding on EMC's primary storage strengths and all-flash leadership, built with XtremIO. 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 dreamed about in the data centre of tomorrow."

There are two new models joining the VMAX arrays – the VMAX 450 and VMAX 850 which are designed to take full advantage of the performance, density and economy of scale offered by enterprise-grade flash storage hardware, EMC said.

The new arrays can scale using a building block, or V-Brick, architecture. Each V-Brick contains one VMAX engine and 53TB of usable capacity, which can be expanded up to a maximum of 500TB in 13TB increments. The VMAX All Flash 450 can be scaled up by combining four V-Bricks, while the VMAX All Flash 850 scales to eight for a maximum 4PB of storage.

The DSSD D5 family is being styled as the first in a new category of rack-scale flash storage. Available from March, this new line-up is based on technology gained with the acquisition of DSSD in 2014. Each connects directly to up to 48 host servers using PCI Express (PCIe) links, effectively offering a shared flash storage pool that is as fast as each server having its own internal PCIe-attached flash storage, according to EMC.

EMC's senior vice president for DSSD John McCool said that the DSSD D5 delivers performance faster than direct-attached flash while delivering operational efficiency, a larger and denser shared pool of flash and centralised management. It has latency as low as 100 microseconds, with throughput as high as 100GBps, and up to 10 million input/output operations per second for demanding applications including big data analytics using Hadoop, high-performance databases and data warehouses. Each 5U DSSD D5 appliance can be fitted with up to 36 4TB flash modules for a maximum raw data capacity of up to 144TB.