After years of slowing growth in its core disk-based array business and constant scrutiny from analysts,  EMC Corp. is finally ready for a change. The data center giant this morning revealed an ambitious effort to retool its entire primary storage portfolio around flash, beginning with the crown jewel: Its flagship VMAX series.

EMC is adding two new models to the line that replace the spinning media used the hood until now with two types of speedy solid-state memory modules. The main variant, dubbed V-Brick, comes in several different sizes starting from 53 terabytes, which is more than some standalone arrays. The VMAX All Flash has room for four such units while its sibling, the VMAX All Flash 850, is able to accommodate as many as eight plus a number of 13-terabyte extension packs. All in all, the vendor says that a fully-packed installation can provide up to four petabytes of storage space.

That’s twice the maximum capacity of the VMAX 40K, the most expensive disk-based model in the series, which is already one of the beefiest primary storage systems on the market. The appliance is also among the most reliable thanks to a dedicated data protection tool that promises to reduce downtime to less than a minute per year. The functionality was carried over in its entirety to the new all-flash models along with all the other management features that have been available to customers so far, according to the company.

EMC is topping off the value proposition with a fixed-rate support program that is described as considerably more accommodating than the usual arrangement. Whereas the vendor has traditionally applied a price hike every time customers renewed their support contracts, it’s now willing to stick with the original terms if an organization buys an all-flash VMAX system. The decision to adopt the model came in the wake of “overwhelming positive feedback” to a trial held run earlier this year that saw a similar option made available for its XtremIO array series.

The line constitutes the second major pillar of EMC’s plan to take on the all-flash storage market. The final piece of the puzzle is the technology the vendor gained as part of its buzzed-about acquisition of DSSD Inc. last year, which it’s since implemented in an array that is debuting today alongside the new VMAX models.

The DSSD 5 is a five rack-unit system packing 100 terabytes of usable capacity that punches way above its weight class with a maximum storage access speed of 10 million IOPS. It’s able to maintain such eye-watering performance while keeping latency as low a tenth of a millisecond, a rate that EMC says was once only achievable by directly attaching flash storage to the server that uses it. In contrast, the new array can support up to 48 machines while still leaving room to keep redundant data copies for backup purposes.

EMC envisions organizations employing the DSSD 5 to store the most frequently accessed records from their Hadoop clusters and high-speed transactional databases. Its performance also makes the array well-suited to support real-time analytics, a use case that is becoming increasingly common thanks to the availability of open-source stream processing frameworks like Apache Storm. The first units will start shipping to customers next month.

Image via Geralt