In a little more than a year, EMC’s XtremIO rose to become the leading all-flash array, according to Gartner’s latest solid-state array market analysis. This is exciting, but not entirely surprising for Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing & Product Management for XtremIO.

“This is something that customers have found insatiable,” Goldstein told theCUBE during EMC World 2015. “What’s been amazing is how fast customers are landing and expanding. The flash array tends to hoover up workloads from all over the data center. It changes the way operations work for companies.”

The time for all-flash array to go mainstream

At EMC World 2015, the company announced version 4.0, a software upgrade to XtremIO v3.X arrays. “I call it the no excuses release,” said Goldstein. “If a customer has been sitting on the sidelines wondering if an all-flash array is mature enough for them, this release shows that everything has been addressed: the scale is there, the data protection, the ability to do replications, everything that you could possibly want is in the platform now. This is really the time for all-flash array to go mainstream.”

Goldstein said that XtremIO’s deduplication technology is just one reason the all-flash array rose to the top of the pack. “We decided early on that all of our data services were going to be in line all the time,” he said. “The only way we can achieve scale, consistency, predictability of performance is to know exactly what the array is going to do on a per-I/O basis every time. With deduplication, we duplicate every block of data coming into the array in real time as it’s arriving.”

One recent EMC client, investment management company Baillie Gifford, transformed its data with XtremIO. “Today, Baillie Gifford is running 50 distinct copies of its Oracle production database, all spaced efficiently on XtremIO,” said Goldstein. “Each developer now has a full copy of the production data as a sandbox. Developers can test in those development copies with the full workload. They’re getting their code written faster, and they’re moving it into production with fewer bugs.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2015.