It certainly is a big week for flash storage, with another PCIe launch today.  This morning EMC announced new PCIe flash cards, a pure-flash architecture, and next generation software that will speed up caching in performance intensive environments. The former two offerings are based on technology the storage vendor obtained through the acquisition of XtremIO in 2012.

Flash Devices

EMC’s new XtremeFS PCIe cards can reduce CPU utilization by half and provide 58 percent better TCO than alternative solutions, according to the company. The vendor claims that its new hardware can deliver throughput of1.13 million IOPS.

XtremeFS is available in six models: four cards that are based on dense MLC SSDs, and two which rely on high performance SLC technology. These devices can be deployed as direct attached storage that sits inside the server, or in combination with EMC’s server caching software to “turbo charge” network storage arrays.

All-Flash Array

The second product that EMC announced today is XtremeIO, an all flash array powered by two Intel-based servers. Wikibon’s David Floyer provided further analysis during his segment on the NewsDesk show this morning (full video below).

“There are a lot of flash-only vendors out there, [but] what this brings is the EMC label, the EMC sales force and EMC quality control. It doesn’t yet have things like replication on it…so there will be areas where the stable VMAX product from EMC will still be required, but over time that will be flushed out,” Floyer said.

Software

The third product that the company unveiled today is the XtremeSW Suite, upcoming caching software that will feature pooling, cache coherence and improved support for flash that’s being used as memory and DAS.

EMC’s announcement is one of several PCIe-related launches this week, coming on the heel of a product update from Seagate and Violin Memory. The latter company’s new Velocity family is fast and self-contained, and ready to compete in this growing market.

See Floyer’s full analysis below: