5 Eye-Popping Facts About Dell EMC's Assault On The All-Flash Market

Dell EMC Bullish On All-Flash

Seizing upon some recent stats from research firm IDC, as well as internal data, Dell EMC storage chief Jeff Boudreau lays out some big numbers from Dell EMC's past year in all-flash storage technology.

In a recent blog, Boudreau recounts Dell EMC's all-flash successes from the past year and looks ahead to the near future, when he says Dell EMC will continue to put distance between itself and other all-flash market players and introduce its first storage system with NVMe.

Boudreau, senior vice president and general manager of midrange storage, admits that perhaps Dell EMC was a little late to the all-flash game, but notes that the company shipped more than an Exabyte of all-flash array capacity in 2016. Here are five key points from Boudreau's Dell EMC all-flash redux.

The Outlook For All-Flash

Boudreau keys in on an IDC forecast that estimates the all-flash market will grow to about $8.9 billion in the next three years, surpassing traditional hard disk arrays. Already, all-flash accounts for 26 percent of total external storage spending, and Boudreau says Dell EMC is in a position to accelerate the transition to all-flash while pushing the technology into "all parts of the data center."

Building On Foundations In VMAX

Boudreau notes that the all-flash version of Dell EMC's bread-and-butter VMAX storage array was launched a year ago this month. In the past year, the company's VMAX bookings grew 70 percent, far outpacing the line's 20 percent annual growth the year before, according to Dell EMC estimates.

Breaking Away From The Pack

Boudreau cites IDC data that shows Dell EMC's all-flash revenue is growing at better than a 72 percent clip annually, outpacing the overall all-flash storage market by more than 10 percentage points. IDC also shows that Dell EMC has more than twice the all-flash market share than its closest competitors. Boudreau says the growth is the result of the broad Dell EMC all-flash portfolio, including VMAX All-Flash, XtremIO and its new Unity All Flash hyper-convergence offering.

The Latest Moves

Recently, Dell EMC has introduced an all-flash version of its Isilon scale-out NAS platform for unstructured data, as well as a flash-enabled version of its Data Domain data protection. The company is also spreading its DSSD technology across its wider all-flash portfolio, a move Boudreau says will help Dell EMC accelerate all-flash innovation.

Looking Ahead

Dell EMC will introduce its first storage system with NVMe, or non-volatile memory express, by the end of the year, according to Boudreau. NVMe technology, which allows the solid-state drives used in all-flash technology to operate far faster and more efficiently, is expected to separate the leaders from the has-beens in the storage market, he says.