With offerings such as VMAX3, VMAX All Flash, and the recently announced Virtustream public cloud platform, EMC has proclaimed 2016 the “year of flash” for primary storage.

EMC’s flash offerings have come a long way since EMC redesigned VMAX from the ground up a few years ago. Fidelma Russo, SVP and GM of the VMAX Business Unit at EMC, said that EMC redesigned VMAX for cloud scale, as well as to ensure it had enough metadata to scale to cloud levels.

“We also added in Snap technology and native embedded management,” she said. “Since then, we’ve leveraged the foundational aspects of that architecture and added in flash technologies into an architecture that formed the basis for VMAX All Flash.”

Evolving flash storage

As pioneers in flash storage, EMC has noticed an increase in capacity and a decrease in costs. Russo said as the technology evolves, EMC focuses on its longevity and rights management. “We spent a lot of time innovating algorithms and added a lot of telemetry,” she said.

Out of the code that changed, Russo said that her team rewrote about 14 million lines of code for HYPERMAX [an open converged storage hypervisor and operating system] and wrote about 5 to 6 million lines of code to reoptimize flash.

Its efforts may certainly pay off. Russo expects to see “at least 30 to 40 percent of enterprise companies moving to all flash by the end of this year.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE