Amid turmoil in the storage industry driven by customers’ rapid adoption of flash technology, software-defined infrastructure and hyper-convergence, EMC has come under some fire for offering a confusing product strategy. Between its homegrown VMAX and XtremIO arrays and the technology it acquired with the purchase of DSSD Inc. last year, the company now has three all-flash offerings. The upcoming merger with Dell could further complicate matters.

We called up Chris Ratcliffe (@ceratcliffe, right), senior vice president of marketing for EMC Core Technologies, to ask for his help straightening things out. Here’s what he told us.

How has EMC adapted to the rapid growth of flash in the data center?

We’ve known for several years that it was only a matter of time before the cost of flash would drop below that of spinning media, so we have been working on refreshing the primary storage line around all-flash arrays since late 2014. We’re not talking about just replacing hard disks with solid-state disks (SSDs), but a total rework around flash. When it became clear that we were going to see the crossover this year, we decided it made financial sense to bring those all-flash arrays to market. To be honest, we were a little surprised at how soon the change happened. But we now have high two immensely capable platforms [VMAX and XtremIO] that are ground-up all-flash designs. They’re fantastic for mixed-workload consolidation.

When should customers consider VMAX vx. XtremIO?

If you need massive multi-dimensional scale, like hundreds or thousands of ports, then VMAX is the choice. If you need six-nines availability, that’s VMAX. If you need support for mainframe, IBM iSeries, file and block storage, that’s VMAX.

If you’re talking about petabyte scale, then XtremeIO is something you should look at, especially if you have compressible workloads and want the operational simplicity of single tier and single platform. It basically comes down to what level of availability you need.

Will XtremIO supplant VMAX at some point?

I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Our view is that no one size fits all. The great thing is that there’s no problem where we don’t have a best-of-breed solution, although that does introduce some complexity into the portfolio.

Do you expect the decline of hard disk drives (HDDs) to accelerate?

Only for specific platforms. We’re seeing huge interest in flash at the high end, but for things like backups and log files, we don’t see flash supplanting disk anytime soon. Remember that HDDs are getting denser and cheaper, too.

Amazon is a $1 billion storage player that’s growing at 70 percent per year with a pretty good flash story. Is it major competition?

In some areas. For many customers, flash is just another form of media with different latency and lifetime characteristics. We view cloud the same way. We’ve been integrating cloud capabilities into all of our products, so today you can have a VMAX with up to four petabytes of flash and a second tier in the cloud with any provider. It’s flash when you need it, but cloud when you don’t.

Do you see any signs that customers are moving from on-premise storage to cloud in a big way?

We’re seeing them look at the issue in terms of how long they’ll have to support an application. If it’s from zero to three years, they might push to the cloud. If it’s three to seven years, they might look at converged infrastructure. If it’s absolutely mission-critical, they look at traditional infrastructure. So we’re not seeing them spend less, but allocate differently.

Will VCE continue to be EMC’s sole converged infrastructure play?

That’s our prime strategy. The benefits of converged infrastructure, which we showed in our Quantum Leap (VxRail) launch, are that when we deliver a stand-alone array you’ll be able to purchase converged infrastructure that incorporates that array at the same time. In many case you’ll also be able to get a software-defined version.

How eagerly are customers adopting software-defined storage arrays?

CIOs tell us they aren’t investing a huge amount in software-defined, but they want to know it’s there. In many cases they’re using virtualization for test and DevOps, but we aren’t seeing them deploy it in the enterprise in a big way

Is software-defined infrastructure a threat to you?

Our industry is littered with companies that didn’t ride the software wave. The reality is that software is much stickier than hardware, so we will offer those options. Our core DNA is to give customers choice. If you want to buy an integrated solution from us, you know we’re going to make it right. If you want to take on the responsibility of delivering and maintaining the hardware, we’re more than happy to support you.