EMC World 2014 is the largest event in storage, and growing. Forty percent of this year’s attendees are new to the conference, and 165 journalists and 105 analysts are attending. EMC dominates the storage industry and is expected to make a series of important announcements.

If you can’t be at EMCWorld this year, follow all the events on theCUBE  starting today at 11:30 a.m. PDT.  TheCUBE has 71 interviews scheduled including sessions with top executives from EMC and VMware, executives from EMC partner companies and EMC users who can talk about how they leverage EMC technology for competitive advantage.

EMCWorld 2014 comes at a time of major transition in the storage industry, with flash storage taking over the high performance storage market and software-led storage beginning to enter the market. In CrowdChat after the analyst meeting before the conference opened, Wikibon CEO and CO-Founder David Vellante listed five questions for EMC going into the conference:

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1. Is the “federation” model the secret for EMC to cross chasm?
2. Can EMC cut the innovators off at the pass?
3. Is ViPR the future of software-defined storage or just a want to stitch the silos together.
4. Can the new stuff (IDC “Platform 3”) grow fast enough to offset the declines in “Platform 2?”
5. Can EMC’s “cloud-in-a-box (aka Nile) and partner strategy effectively compete with Amazon AWS at scale?

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Pressure from flash

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The immediate pressure on EMC comes mostly from stolid-state storage and innovators such as SolidFire. Flash storage offers multiple advantages including order-of-magnitude greater response rates and IO. But equally important, much more consistent performance under differing read/write loads. And the price of flash, initially much higher than disk, has fallen to the point where, when used with dedupe and compression technology, it is competitive with disk on a per Gbyte basis.

Wikibon CTO and Co-Founder David Floyer says EMC is feeling that shift, with sales of high performance disk storage dropping while its solid-state storage gains market share. EMC was a pioneer in solid-state, with the first commercial solid state arrays. But it needs to make the transition to direct-attached Server SAN, which takes full advantage of the greater speed of flash and the flexibility of software-defined storage and is growing in popularity today in the hyperscale cloud mega-centers.

Redefining EMC

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This year’s conference theme is “Redefine”, and Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman says theCUBE will give viewers the opportunity to hear how EMC users are redefining their services and mission as well as their underlying storage infrastructure and the part EMC is playing in that.

Highlights of theCUBE coverage include interviews with EMC Global Service SVP Tom Roloff, VCE CEO Praveen Akkiraju, Ehud Rokach, Co-founder of EMC XtremeIO, VMware CEO Paul Gelsinger, EMC Products and Marketing President Jeremy Burton, and EMC Information Infrastructure CEO David Goulden.

Graphic courtesy EMC