EMC in May 2012 acquired XtremIO, an Israel-based startup developer of all-flash storage arrays that at the time had only shipped a couple of beta units.

EMC in March said XtremIO is at its heart based on proprietary software running on industry-standard server and SSDs. Each 4U XtremIO storage block, which EMC calls an X-Brick, supposedly has a capacity of 6.763 TB without deduplication, and it offers more than 150,000 functional 4-KB mixed read-write IOs per second and 250,000 functional 4-KB read IOPS. The array features scale-out operation so that adding a new X-Brick scales both capacity and performance linearly. XtremIO also utilizes all the flash storage components and other components across the system to increase performance.

The EMC XtremIO all-flash array is a part of EMC's new Emerging Technology Products Division, under the leadership of Chirantan "CJ" Desai, who in September joined EMC as president of the division.