EMC has made it official. The storage giant is acquiring XtremIO.

The company issued a press release this morning with few details about the acquision, which is reported to be about $430 million.

XtremIO is a pure-flash provider. To learn more about the acquisition, see our coverage here and here.

XtremIO does complement the range of EMC Flash-based systems and software . The company entered the market in 2008 when it began integrating Flash drives into enterprise storage arrays.  The company says that in 2011, it shipped to customers over 24 PBs of Flash drive capacity.

But that amount still pales compared to companies like Fusion-io, which has been on a tear over the past 12 to 18 months, selling twice the amount of flash that EMC sold.

Companies are adopting flash at a rapid rate as they seek to scale back  the big disk-drive storage machines that hog space in its data centers. Flash is faster, making it more compelling with data rich applications that require far higher I/O capacity.

EMC offers flash drives in the EMC VMAX , VMAXe , VNX, VNXe and Isilon storage arrays.  Earlier this year, EMC announced “Project Thunder,” optimized for high-frequency, low-latency read/write workloads.  EMC’s approach is to use software for moving high-performanceor “hot”data to enterprise Flash drives to improve application and storage system performance, and automatically move less-active data to SAS/FC and NL-SAS/ SATA storage tiers.

But pure flash capabilities are the wave of the future and we should expect to hear more on that front when we gather in Las Vegas later this month for EMC World.